In between music being created and appearing on TV, digital or film there's a few steps along the journey where people need to help it along. For example lets consider advertising. Did you know that during a typical music search for a global brand like Nestle or Kelloggs the number of songs that will be considered is often in the triple figures. "But that's over a weeks worth of music listening" I hear you say. Well don't worry we're not in the habit of chaining our music supervisors to the desk and throwing away the key.... the way it works is this; We are but one music company supplying options to the agency. The ad agency in question will typically be going out to three or four master supervision companies or have senior supervisors in house to manage final selections. Each of these senior supervisors or "soups" will have their own teams of researchers. Each researcher will go out to their preferred sources, representatives for the major catalogues, independent music soups, indie labels, independent music companies (like us), even bespoke composers, managers, bohemouth production libraries like EMI Production Music (now owned by Sony / AVT formerly KPM music house) In turn each of these will have their own people, familiar with their particular catalogues, listening to many and selecting few of the tracks they are empowered by the artist to act on behalf of by way of licensing agreement, (just like ours!) So you see its a multi-tiered selection process with many stages of selection. With that much music under consideration you may be dis heartened, thinking its a wonder anything ever gets licensed at all. But what you have to remember is that there are hundreds of new campaigns being created every year in the UK alone and with the global offices for a lot of the large agencies situated in London, our HQ is well placed to go in for some of this work too. But as you can image its not as simple as posting a CD through the JWT Global Offices front door letter box and expecting to end up landing a six figure licensing deal. (In any case, they have a glass revolving door with no letterbox.) So the reason our clients, (the "soups" mentioned earlier,) come to us is that we've done a some of the heavy lifting for them. With our reach, we can offer musicians in a variety of styles, sure... but using our music community, we supply music that has been rated and reviewed with a far higher level of due-diligence than an in-house team of musicologists could have given. Also through our network of affiliate & joint venture supervisors, we are able to get the music one step closer to goal. But why would these people spend their precious time analysing, tagging and reviewing music, listening alongside pictures and liaising with client as to why your song would be perfect for their brief...? Simple!! Under our model if you do a percentage of the work, you get a percentage of the cut when the license fee clears and the dust settles. Obviously the lions share will always go to the artist, but if you're interested in the specifics then check out our video series on the River. And if you'd like to try your hand at doing a little music curation for us for existing artists like yourself, whether its just dipping a toe in the ocean, or getting in deep with the C&R team here, you're welcome at any level of involvement you fancy. Don't worry, you don't have to have swallowed the full works of the 1974 collected Encyclopedia of Musicology in order to begin as we provide training on our system, but its pretty intuitive once you get going and is more geared around champoining the elements you love in a song, rather then working out whether or not its a 5/4 time signature, classical bossa-nova modal key with a dominant suspension... nah!! just "this sounds MIGHTY" is where we're at. And just like anyone else in the community, if the music you back gets the license, you will see a cut of the funds. Its not liable to be massive, but you can rate and review music way faster than creating it, and with a steady stream of mini-license payments coming in, you could soon see it as a viable income in and of itself.
So below to summarise the five major players in the journey of a song from creation to broadcast, we've listed each 'job role' and bit of blurb explaining who they are and what they do. In a typical old school, brick and mortar music company, these will be department heads with teams underneath them.
Music Creator
A&R (Artist and Repertoire)
Catalogue and Review
Creative Supervisor
Client (End of Line)