Whether to use library music, commercial tracks or
commission a bespoke score depends on your budget, genre and the show’s
potential for overseas sales.
Producers searching for the right music for a programme face
of plethora of choices. Library music is usually the easiest and cheapest
option, but a bespoke composition will likely deliver more creative flare.
The trade-off is in time and cost. Commercial music is
the most expensive option, but can be just right for certain shows.
To take one example: the Ed Sheeran song Galway Girl
credits nine writers, including Sheeran, so if a producer wanted to use it in a
show, they would need permission from all nine writers – and, potentially, nine
different publishers.
“If, during the process of trying to clear a song, one of
the copyright holders demands more money, then you have to pay the other
copyright holders the same amount,” says Simon Pursehouse, director of
music services at specialist commercial music publisher Sentric. “It can get
very expensive.”
Sentric, he says, will only put forward tracks that fi t the
producer’s budget: “£10,000 won’t buy you a Kanye West track but we have
up-and-coming artists with a similar vibe that might just work.”
ITV2’s Love Island, for example, used Sentric tracks from
artists including Arlissa and Rothwell.
Programmes that are only for UK broadcast are covered
by blanket licencing deals for production, commercial and commissioned music,
administered by music bodies PRS, MCPS and the PPL, the latter of which
looks after the owners of master recordings – typically the record companies.
The rates are negotiated by the bodies with the broadcasters
and depend on factors including audience share. Producers need only clear
payment for use after the event – provided broadcasters report what music they
have used.
Some licences are charged on a transactional basis with set
rates per cue. The Independent Production Company licence from PRS – used
by indies to clear music used in programmes made for Channel 4, Channel 5
and S4C – is an example of this.
“However, with more and more shows destined for overseas
sale, the model is shifting to one where producers will clear rights for all
territories and pay up front rather than worry about licencing afterwards,”
says Pursehouse.
Drama Republic’s Wanderlust for BBC1 and Netflix
followed this route, with tracks including Submarine by Jelani Blackman
and Message by Jamie Woon.
“As SVoD services like Amazon Prime and Netflix evolve,
they are beginning to cover the music rights for bought-in content themselves,”
says BMG Production Music senior manager of sales and marketing Michael
Cromwell.
“Ultimately, the most important factor for an indie when
their content is being broadcast worldwide is for the music to be clearable in
all territories,” he adds. “Programmes that TX in the UK with commercial music
and are then sold worldwide have to have all of that music stripped and
replaced with production music.
“As a result, to save time, more productions are putting
production music in the UK version, so that it is clear to be used worldwide.”
Faced with wrangling multi-territory rights for a recent doc
series, Spring Films chose a different route. “We’d used commercial music
played and recorded by local bands from the north-east, which gave exactly the
right sound and style to the films,” says managing director Richard
Melman.
“Following UK transmission, however, we had to strip it all
out and replace it with specially composed music for international
distribution, as it was significantly cheaper to do it that way. We simply
could not afford the global, all-media fees. “Unfortunately, that’s what a
distributor requires in order to sell without restrictions.”
Looking for originality
When it comes to licenced music, the holy grail is to find
something that doesn’t sound like licenced music, according to Melman.
“All too often when you are searching, it seems to be ‘drum
pattern number 7 with arpeggio strings number 12 in 32 variations’,” he says.
“We look for originality, simplicity of licensing and a company that
understands our needs.”
BMG, for instance, realised that creatives were finding it
difficult to pinpoint exactly what music they wanted and were using commercial
tracks as a reference.
“So we co-created a music searching tool,
Music Matcher, that can take any YouTube link, audio fi le or even video
fi le to analyse the waveform of a track and find something similar within our
catalogue,” says Cromwell.
Turning to a composer may be more expensive in terms of
up-front time and cost but provides greater flexibility as deals tend to be
made directly with the artist. Under UK and EU copyright law, half of
performance income goes directly to the composer, with the other half going to
the music publisher, though this share is transferable.
Indeed, some indies are looking to retain rights to music
composed for their series to add another revenue stream when selling their
content worldwide.
“If the producer wants to buy out a composer’s share [of
copyright] then you will usually charge more per minute because you are losing
publishing rights,” says Anne Nikitin, who has scored episodes of BBC2’s
Natural World, Channel 5’s Banged Up Abroad and Netflix true-crime
series Captive.
“If the show doesn’t have much budget, then you usually
agree to keep the copyright. But you can also share a percentage of the
copyright with the producer. It’s negotiable.”
With 50% up for grabs, the British Academy of
Songwriters, Composers & Authors (Basca) has a warning for artists and
producers.
“It is becoming an increasingly common practice, and in our
view bad practice, for commissioners and production companies to insist that
they take all of the publishing,” says Basca chair Crispin Hunt. “But insisting
they are credited as a writer is even worse. It is deceitful and unethical.”
In response, a spokeswoman for Pact says the indie body
has “always had a good working relationship with the music unions and guilds”,
adding: “In fact, the Incorporated Society of Musicians has just asked us for a
collective agreement.”
BRITANNIA: TAKING INSPIRATION FROM MASSIVE ATTACK
“With Britannia, we wanted to find a composer who not only
has a very original, contemporary sound but could also handle a classical
score,” says Vertigo Films producer James Richardson.
His choice was Neil Davidge, the regular producer for the
group Massive Attack, whose album Mezzanine had been used as a temp score
in the edit.
“We thought it would be great to have a type of sound that
counters this strange period drama every way we could,” he says.
Off-the-peg tracks could never deliver the musical
complexity of a series of Britannia’s scope, he adds: “With any big-scale show,
you need a fully composed score to join the pieces together, deal with emotions
and move from one shade to another.
With Britannia, the soundtrack had to be supple enough to
cope with the visuals, which range from grandiose and massive to very intimate
and everything in between. You need someone to design that and help take the
audience on that journey.”
THE COMPOSER’S VIEW
“Producers are increasingly savvy about how to work with a
composer on a smaller budget,” says composer Anne Nikitin.
“If the music budget
is tight, they might ask for only 15 minutes of composed music per episode, but
as long as they receive a score with bespoke themes that fi t the brief, they
can expand its usage throughout the show by using stems [audio fi les split into
individual music tracks].”
For Netflix doc series Captive, Nikitin was briefed to
write 20 minutes of music per episode, which included bespoke themes (to give
each episode a specific identity), as well as more general themes to tie the
series together.
The tracks were recorded and mixed with live instruments and
delivered with stems so that the editors could then use them across the series.
Nikitin’s original brief for forthcoming BBC1 period
drama Mrs Wilson was for a traditional piano score, but having watched the
rushes and met with the director as the series moved into post, a creative
decision was made to compose for strings.
“It’s good to discuss ideas during pre-production – usually
after reading the script – but quite often it’s not until you start watching
the first cuts in the edit that you get more of a sense of what kind of music
will work,” she says.
“One of my bugbears is that production companies are unaware
of how much it costs to record. It’s not just hiring a studio and players – you
need an orchestrator and someone to prep the files for the session as well as a
mixer. These costs add up.
RISE OF THE MACHINES: THE USE OF AI MUSIC
While nothing can yet compare to human creative input,
artificial intelligence will increasingly be used to churn out quick and cheap
music tracks, with a potential impact on the library music businesses.
“AI-created music occasionally captures the essence of
something good, but seems to miss the point on some human, emotional or
production level,” says Platinum Music director Nick Vince.
“The cautionary tale of technology is that it rarely offers
a genuine shortcut, however glorious its presentation may be,” says
Warner/Chappell Production Music creative director Roberto Borzoni.
“Most of our best work comes from understanding someone
beyond the brief. AI can’t currently juggle the varied demands of our clients.”
As in other areas of the industry, AI will aid library
searches with automated metadata tagging and suggestions to clients.
Furthermore, AI tools such as Humtap and Popgun are emerging for use by
musicians for instrument modelling and composition.
The technology also raises an issue surrounding transparency
on how algorithms are trained. If, for example, audio from music libraries is
used to train an AI music model, the AI would technically possess an ‘essence’
of the writing style of all the composers who were analysed in the training
data.
“Any independent company profiting from this, even if the
music generated by their AI is technically original, would effectively be
profiting, indefinitely, from the influence of those composers’ work,” says
Vince.
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