8Sided Blog

thoughts about music’s place in the 21st century

An Interview With Sync-Club Podcast

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Listen to “Rolling the Dice with Michael Donaldson | 001” on Spreaker.

Steven Cleveland — of the electronic band Ping Trace who I’ve worked with — has started a podcast titled Sync-Club. As I understand it, the podcast is Steven’s journey in better understanding the worlds of publishing, licensing, and synchronization with the listener along for the ride. The podcast will feature interviews with professionals working in synch as the knowledge gets dropped. It’s a great concept. The synch world could use some demystification from a learner’s point of view.

I’m honored to help launch this podcast by being the interviewee on the first episode. Steven and I have a fun and informative conversation. I go deep on a variety of licensing-related subjects, and towards the end, I reveal a few tactics for the best ways that an independent artist can reach out to music supervisors.

The podcast conversation is also like a taste of one of my consulting sessions. I cover similar ground with my label and artist clients. Interested? Send me a note.

One of my favorite riffs concerns how an artist should not overthink the synch market, falling into the trap of creating music that might be ‘great for licensing.’ Music your fans love will end up being the music that supervisors love, so don’t abandon both by writing music to some imagined spec. Here’s a transcription of this riff from the podcast, edited for clarity:

There is a market for creating music specifically with sync in mind, and that’s called library music. And if you want to make library music that’s fine if that’s your prerogative. But if you’re looking for something beyond that, then you still need to create the best music you can for your fans, your audience.

A music supervisor, a showrunner, or a director will want their project to be cool and distinctive. So they’re going to look for cool and distinctive music to match their perception of what the project should be. When you’re making music to spec or to what you think someone is going to want to hear, you’re not making distinctive music. It might sound cool, but it’s not going to be distinctive.

And another issue is I feel like the library music industry is in jeopardy because of AI music. Creating music to spec — for example, songs with glockenspiels and handclaps with the lyrics, “you can do it!” — is intentionally generic. But people make songs like these because they’re the kind of songs used in a lot of videos. It’s a race to the bottom, and nothing is going to be closer to the bottom and able to do spec better than a computer in two or three years.

I feel bad for people that are making a living in the library music industry because I think they’re the ones who are going to be hurt by this. But on the other hand, artists and bands with distinctive sounds and sticky stories — a story behind the band and who they are and what they’re about — are going to stand out in the synch world. Those kinds of bands may even see an increase in the money they’re making from synch as the field of distinctive, story-driven artists will actually narrow in a crowded marketplace.

You also have to think in terms of who music supervisors are when you’re pitching music. You have to put yourself in their shoes and understand where they come from. Music supervisors are music fans. That’s the reason they got into the profession. I was thinking earlier today about how a lot of newer executives in the record industry are tech people rather than music people. It’s almost like music supervision is the last area that’s entirely populated by music fans, and I don’t see that changing.

Your average music supervisor was in a band once, or they were a DJ on a college radio station or at a nightclub. They might have worked at a label or written about music professionally. When you realize that you better understand how to pitch your music. Music supervisors want to discover bands. They want to support a band that has a story that they connect with. And obviously, they also want a really good song that fits the project. But if you have a compelling story, then you have a greater chance of getting your song to them.

Check out Sync-Club’s website here, and be sure to subscribe to the podcast’s newsletter — and the podcast itself via your favorite listening platform — as I’m sure it will provide a wealth of useful information.

Choosing, Not Chosen

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Here’s an informative video that inspired a spirited conversation in my household:

I can understand the overwhelming temptation to appease and filter for THE ALGORITHM when you’re making a living off your YouTube and online efforts. But there’s a loss of voice, akin to the loss of agency that casual listening creates. Rather than choosing we’re being chosen.

There’s an SEO plug-in installed on my blog, and it tells me that I should optimize my titles and my content for traffic-catching metrics. I was paying attention to its demands for a while, changing snappy short titles to longer (less fun) ones that complied with SEO-recommended character limits. I was told to insert keywords into the content and always attach eye-catching featured images (I was never good at that aspect). I’d get stressed out when the plug-in told me that I wasn’t adhering to the internet’s mysterious ordinances.

But, here’s the thing: there are many blogs and newsletters that I love, and none of these follow the rules. Some of these authors have a voice that flies in the face of these rules — one-word titles, blog posts with only a few sentences, the minimalist of minimal site layouts. I frequent these outlets for the voice of the author, not any click-worthy title or high search rank. I fear that if we all follow the SEO or algorithmic guidelines, then these voices would disappear. Pleasing the SEO computer is trying to please everyone, and we all know the cliché about what happens when you try to please everyone. But it’s more than ending up not pleasing anybody — it’s about not connecting with your people, to not have a flag on the map of your territory, to be invisible from your tribe.

There are those who are going for mass and, according to their goals, choose to follow the rules. That’s cool. Derek Muller, in the video above, is doing so grudgingly but he’s in the machine where 5 million vs. 10 million views have a direct impact on his project’s budget. Veritasium is a channel with — at the least — staff and travel requirements, so there’s a good reason to keep the views and funding high.1And it’s a well-done science channel, worth your subscription in my opinion. But my needs — and the needs of the bloggers and channels I follow — are different. We’re looking for that longterm connection and an audience that’s on board because of our way of saying things. It’s not that Derek doesn’t want that — it’s evident from his video that his voice and point of view are essential and he’s struggling with maintaining these — but the success of his platform is affected by more important things. On the other hand, at this point, I measure my success by people enjoying what I do and, to paraphrase Seth Godin, missing me when I’ve gone quiet.

I’m thinking about the direction of this blog all of the time. I change my mind about it constantly. But what always sticks is that I want it to be fun for you and — most importantly, if I’m honest — fun for me. I’m using this to find my people, to have conversations, and make those connections. And I’m using it to find potential friends, collaborators, clients, and employers. An SEO plug-in’s suggestions won’t be much help there. I see these imposed guidelines as a detriment and I’m happy to resist. So expect the blog to get more personal, more specialized, and obtuse — my private-made-public playground. No holding back the freak flag.

Jogging House’s Lure: A Quiet Resistance

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A review of the album Lure, by hopeful ambient artist Jogging House.

There was this charming quality to a lot of ambient music in the ’90s — optimistic and melodic, far off from today’s dominating dark drones. It was a different era, and perhaps the sound reflected a rosy view of what awaited in the new millennium. But what we find in the 2010s are the hushed rushes of disconcerting noise and queasy clashing of synth lines, an ambiance of tension and uncertainty befitting our times. It makes sense — the world is an increasingly scary and debilitating place, and sometimes our music sounds like it. But optimism is resistance — it really is — and that’s what makes Jogging House’s latest album Lure so welcome, special, and quietly radical.

Jogging House — whose name is apparently a letter added to ‘jogging hose,’ AKA sweat pants — states the album is “about accepting the things we cannot change and finding comfort in uncertainty.” This philosophy is the pragmatism of the stoic, and it’s also not being paralyzed with helplessness when the world is out of control. Staying in motion and hopeful as an artist and creator rather than blocked and immobile in the face of hourly ‘breaking news’ and topical turmoil. That’s resistance.

I want to connect Jogging House to Brian Eno, but not to compare him to another composer working in the ‘ambient’ realm. Instead, I think Lure‘s songs closely reflect something Eno said in an interview: “One of the reasons one makes music or any kind of art is to create the world that you’d like to be in or the world that you would like to try. You would like to find out what that world is like.” That’s how I feel when I listen to “Tulip,” Lure‘s opening track. It’s transportive — light and playful, melodies as aspiration and reassurance that’s calm and kind. And it’s gorgeous, on the verge of sadness but not quite getting there. This is a world I’d like to try.

The album’s eight tracks share this gentle atmosphere, evoking a separate era. It’s the optimism of the past looking forward, like the mentioned-above ’90s electronic acts but also not too far from those pioneering the form in the ’70s. I’ll give in and sonically connect Eno anyway, as the beautiful “Weavings” wouldn’t be out of place on a Cluster album. Lure was recorded on 1/4″ tape, after all, using a variety of not-in-the-box gear.

But I emphasize this isn’t merely a throwback — it’s music fit for our times. These sounds are an encouragement to persevere rather than wallow; to foster hope and the imagination of something better for us all. You may ask, how can something so serene inspire action? It can, I respond. It really can.