SOUND FOR THE SCREEN
Traditional television is changing. In addition to well-established and high-quality terrestrial broadcasters, subscription-based streaming giants such as Netflix are lining up to compete for your attention. Apple TV+, Amazon Prime and Disney+ are the latest names on the block but you can be sure they won’t be the last. Meanwhile, the profiles of leading film composers continue to soar and higher-education courses at global universities and music conservatoires are finding their film-music and music-to-picture pathways over-subscribed. If you’re among the growing number of people hungry to get involved in writing music to picture, read on.
There are three core ways that music-to-picture writing happens in film, television and advertising. The first is the primary focus of this article: a music writer is hired to create a bespoke soundtrack for a project.
The second way that soundtracks are typically collated for broadcast is via production music, widely known as library music, a fine option for broadcasters with a low budget and time constraints. A solid library should boast thousands of tracks, organised by genre, style and instrumentation, making it a simple case of searching for tracks that fit your broadcast’s narrative. Production music is convenient if music is required close to a broadcaster’s transmission date but it lacks the exclusivity that comes with a unique commissioned score – remember, those very same library tracks are available to other productions too.
Thirdly, existing music too, can be licensed for picture. Perhaps the best example of this is when pop songs are picked up for the opening or closing credits of a film or commercial. These tracks are typically well known and bring with them their own connotations, while their sounds, lyrical content or the profile of their singer has been deemed a match for the publisher’s aims.
Composers make money in two ways via production music and individual track licencing. The first sees a fee paid to secure the usage of the track in question. This is called a mechanical licence. The second is that, once the project airs, it generates performance royalties based on when or where it plays, on television, radio, online or in cinemas. These royalty streams are available to composers who are directly commissioned to write music to picture too. The fee paid to a composer substitutes for a mechanical royalty and, once the project airs,
