Landing music on tv / in films

April 21, 2022 7:26 AM

Have any of the talented, kind, and -- let's face it -- atypically good-looking people of AskMe been successful placing their original music in films or tv shows?

How'd you do it? Are you aware of significant changes in the process since your success? Questions apply to both fully realized songs and instrumental, sort of ambient pieces.

posted by troywestfield to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

Best answer: I haven't personally done it, but I've played on several songs that have appeared on network TV shows and/or DVDs. The one artist joined Taxi, which at the time cost $400-ish per year, and they would do some pitching of your songs, and in his case, it worked. I think there were about five songs that I played on that were licensed. Sometimes the show used a well-known song in the broadcast version and then replaced it with a cheaper song for the streaming version or DVDs, so the payout was never that big, but I think it covered his costs of joining Taxi, and then some.

The other one was a fluke. The music people for a show were looking for songs about a particular thing, found the lyrics for my friend's song via google, which fit the theme, but then they ended up using a different song of his. It was a CBS show (and my bass playing was clearly audible in a scene with Justine Bateman, which pretty much means I'm friends with the entire cast of Arrested Development), but if I recall, the payout was only like $1000.
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:29 AM on April 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

One artist who seems like she might be approachable about this is Zöe Keating. She's pretty open about what musicians actually earn these days, and how it's done. Maybe send her an email or reach out on social media? The worst that can happen is that she won't answer you.

...Okay, I guess she could tell you to take a hike, but I can't imagine her being the sort of person who would.
posted by cleverevans at 9:41 AM on April 21, 2022

A wonderful person I know has done this by working at In the Groove Music. Not sure how it works but they do have a "general inquiries and music submissions" form on their web site contacts page.
posted by evilmomlady at 1:17 PM on April 21, 2022

Unfortunately I’m so far removed from the subject now that I’ve forgotten what I’ve known but for your internet searches, the industry term you’re looking for is music sync rights.
posted by Ookseer at 2:33 PM on April 21, 2022

Best answer: I have a bunch of my music in a music library, and through that have had dozens of tracks used in well-known TV shows — but that usage is not called a placement, I don't believe (and earns much less money than a "sync" type of placement). The whole system is a bit of a black box to me, I just kind of let it do its thing, and collect a few hundred bucks each year without really knowing that much about how it all works.

But, as far as I understand, the library will sometimes pitch songs to shows, or shows/networks will ask the library for recommendations which can then lead to syncs. I once got one "real" placement this way, and another time I got an email from the library, out of the blue, saying that one of my songs was on a shortlist for a big network show, but that one never came to fruition.

So I guess what I'm saying is that, one possible but extremely unlikely and passive way of getting placements is to join a music library that pitches to production companies. I don't know how commonly this is done by libraries; I suspect that the bigger libraries don't do it, whereas more specialized, industry-focused ones might.

Several years ago, when I did research all of this stuff, Taxi definitely came up as a standard way of participating in the sync casino, but it seemed too advanced/expensive for me (I'm not primarily a musician and don't need or want a lot of what they offer or try to achieve on your behalf).
posted by edlundart at 12:39 AM on April 25, 2022

Oh, you probably already know this, but step one is registering all your songs with a performing rights organization such as BMI or ASCAP.
posted by edlundart at 12:42 AM on April 25, 2022