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.

Don’t Fear the Music Robots

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Advances in artificial intelligence, and its applications in our working worlds, understandably create tension and fear. There is the feeling that no job is safe and, for songwriters and musicians, the development of A.I. composed songs is a substantial threat. Though these concerns aren’t entirely unfounded, I think we can find a way to evade the robots.

Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief product officer and co-creator of Behance, writes in Fast Company:

Creativity is antithetical to the way artificial intelligence works. We develop machine learning by feeding in data about the way people react in certain situations. The point of algorithms is to predict what most people will do and execute that expected action. But what makes something creative is the unexpected. […]

For workers who are threatened by displacement, developing the ability to express ideas in a creative way can help them evolve from a threatened job title to one with more security.

All of my artist clients are eager to break into film and television music. Their first impulse is to create music according to spec — that is, determine a set of rules for music that fits a particular context and write to that. For example, music for a happy product advertisement should contain ukulele and glockenspiel, have a bouncy beat, feature lyrics with phrases like “let’s get together and smile.”

If your goal is fulfilling a spec requirement — whether it’s your own imagined rules or someone else’s — then you’ll be outdone. You’ll have to be faster and cheaper than the others who are also delivering to spec. And, in the future, this includes A.I. The answer is to go beyond spec, to provide something more than the rules require. Something personal and unexpected.

“Then how do I create music for movies and TV shows?” It’s as simple as making the best music you’re capable of and creating it in a way that represents you. This music needs to be distinctive to stand out. It should be from the heart. And it could only have been made by you.

Yes, many projects demand specifications. Ukuleles and glockenspiels are all over online product ads. But soon low-priced music libraries will be filled with A.I. created versions of these songs. No one does spec better than a computer, and that signals a race to the bottom. You don’t want to be a part of that race.

Project managers looking for generic music at the lowest price-point are familiar in our industry. But there are also music supervisors looking for music that’s cool and distinctive, as that will make their projects cool and distinctive. They pay handsomely for that piece of ‘cool.’

The dominance of A.I. in the traditional ‘library music’ field will make the difference starker. The rewards will come to those with a story to tell, with music that’s identifiable and capable of connection. Don’t overthink it. Focus your craft on finding a unique voice and a sound that will continue to inspire you. That will lead to your best work — work that others will seek and appreciate. But following the market’s presumed expectations pits you against the robots. I’ve seen that movie — it’s a futile battle.

Nick Cave may have put it best on The Red Hand Files, his brilliant new Q&A blog:

What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.

🔗 → How To Thwart the Robots: Unabashed Creativity
🔗 → Considering human imagination the last piece of wilderness, do you think AI will ever be able to write a good song?