Tag: jingles

Some Stuff I’ve Learned Writing Music for Advertising—Why I Keep Doing This

Posted on January 30, 2017 by - Columns

A still from the Cadillac Super Bowl ad scored by COPILOT featuring a n almost robotic-looking female model with prominent silver lipstick and eyeliner as well as a silver earring

Revision & Expansion

In my previous post, I looked at the very thorny issue of how we communicate with clients to understand what they are looking for and why. Communication is probably just as important as composing chops when it comes to successful collaborations with clients, but I often tell my students that what really makes or breaks a relationship with a freelance composer is the revision process. Composers who can make changes in a quick and friendly way rise to the top of the list, whereas those who constantly present resistance and debate fall to the bottom of the list.

I certainly believe in taking a stand at times. There’s a basic level of respect that artists deserve, and clients who don’t listen to their vendor’s ideas are only limiting the creativity of their own work in the end.  If I feel strongly about an approach, I will also advocate to at least include it as an option alongside the client’s preferred approach. But similarly, composers who assume they always know best and can’t possibly improve their work by incorporating client feedback are closing themselves off to expansion and growth.

Composers who assume they always know best are closing themselves off to expansion and growth.

While in the heat of the moment I’m often loathe to admit it, hindsight makes it abundantly clear that there have been many counterintuitive feedback requests that have pushed my work to new places, opened up creative doors that I assumed were closed, and revealed to me things I didn’t know I could do. When the artistic voice in my head screams “that’s impossible!” after receiving a request, it’s the business voice that mutters “just try for their sake” that pushes me forward, often into a better place.

Take, for example, the music I wrote for a Cadillac Super Bowl commercial. The original demo included the key elements of the final music that the clients loved, such as the tremolo lithopone and lullaby synth melody.

Cadillac Chrome Couture Demo Mix from COPILOT on Vimeo.

But the original drum and percussion section was more tribal sounding with a quarter note pulse, pushing the whole piece slightly into the world of dance music. One of the big gut-check issues with the spot was whether it was skewing too far towards a female-only demographic given its fashion show milieu. So this eventually made its way into anxieties about my music, and I was tasked by the agency’s creative director with revising the drums until they got more muscular, primal, live, and raw sounding, with less of a groove. There was no time for studying these hunches. (There rarely is.) Revisions like this one just happen when creative people are motivated by a deadline and an open-ended problem.

These and other changes to carve sections out and create more surprising moments (perhaps they worried about the visuals not being impactful), and edits to follow changes in timings, which seemed like an arbitrary hassle to me at the time (my original demo was perfect, couldn’t they see that?), pushed me to write something that was ultimately weirder and more attention-grabbing. Boy did I appreciate that when it came on in the middle of the biggest TV slot of the year, with no voice over or additional sound design cluttering up the final music.

Here’s the final version:

Cadillac “Chrome Couture” from COPILOT on Vimeo.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve spent countless hours executing bad ideas. Many come from clients that know just enough about writing music to cause trouble. They need to hear the idea not working before they give up on it. Many others are simply compromises between two strong creative positions with different motivations and stakeholders. “Splitting the difference” or “finding the midpoint” usually means watering down in the end. Nonetheless, I’ve grown to really embrace feedback as a moment where I get pushed and challenged, and I’m ultimately grateful for those moments as they make me learn new tricks. You can’t get too possessive about your music in this industry. You have to be completely 100% emotionally invested in what you are doing when you are doing it, because that is the level of artistry that’s required to be successful. But once the music leaves your computer, it takes on its own life, and you must simply wish it luck and offer support when needed.

As a young composer, I got down about having to try ridiculous things mentioned by folks with no idea what the process would entail. Now I see it as a challenge: a great composer can take any note on a piece and address it so well that the client feels like a genius for suggesting it. Many clients, after all, want to feel like they are adding something creative to a project, that it wouldn’t be the same without their ideas. If you show your client that you care about their ideas and won’t leave them hanging, you have a pretty good shot at another project.

Sometimes as a composer you are creating notes for musicians to play, sometimes you are creating a space for collaborators to play in.

There’s another very practical advantage to bringing the client’s ideas directly into the piece and making them work. In situations that involve a lot of stake holders and layers of bureaucracy, and when agency teams have listened to many other options for a spot, you can turn that person into an advocate for your composition because of the sense of ownership that comes with contributing ideas. Sometimes as a composer you are creating notes for musicians to play, sometimes you are creating a space for collaborators to play in.

Why I Keep Doing This

If you are reading NewMusicBox, it is likely you’ve seen rumors about our new president eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts. We could be entering a dark period for federal arts funding.

I’m going to use a controversial economic term, but stay with me: music for advertising allows money from companies to “trickle down” into the arts community. These projects provide us an income and hone our skills while we continue to pursue our passion projects. The year I scored that Super Bowl spot, for a product I personally disliked (due to its poor fuel economy), was also the year I wrote and produced my band Charming’s third album, without the need for label support. Not only was I able to live comfortably in the midst of recording an album that was at best a niche product, but I had free studio time at the jingle house.

What I do could easily be seen as a selling out to corporate interests. By definition it is. Yet it doesn’t feel that way.

The greatest joy I get from my job as lead composer and creative director at COPILOT is being able to bring work to my talented friends. What I do could easily be seen as a selling out to corporate interests. By definition it is. Yet it doesn’t feel that way when I’m also hiring a diverse group of composers, musicians, singers, and engineers for projects.

Session work took a real hit when high-quality sample libraries became ubiquitous, production schedules shrank, and budgets imploded. Live recording became thought of as a time-consuming luxury. But now, when I meet a musician, the first thing I ask is, “Are you set up to record yourself?” With a good computer, quiet room, microphone, audio interface, studio headphones, and software, a musician or singer can be available for session work at a moment’s notice. While I love working face-to-face in the studio when I can, the ability to work remotely has opened many smaller projects up to live recording, mostly due to how much quicker things can get done.

What’s Ahead

In the ensuing debate following the election, I heard many pundits talking about how it’s not trade deals and immigration that will kill American jobs, it’s automation. And lo and behold, last week The New York Times published a piece about a company called Jukedeck. Apparently they’ve developed an artificial intelligence system for writing original music for media projects. There were rumors for years in the jingle industry about composers and programmers dabbling in this area, so it wasn’t a complete shock.

I’m not terrified yet. In some ways, an AI system for cranking out music doesn’t seem like a far leap from the crowd-sourcing scale of library music. Can an AI system keep up with current trends in composition and scoring? Can an AI system make the kind of mistakes or breaks from convention that create new trends? Can an AI system understand comedy? Can an AI system move beyond a single emotion or style and combine things in new, unexpected ways? The answer to all of these questions is, of course, “We’ll see.”

A composer’s job is not just to crank out music.

But if I’ve tried to communicate anything through these posts, it’s been that a composer’s job is not just to crank out music—it’s to understand a problem, understand the trajectory and context of a project, and to build relationships and trust through communication.

If AI figures out how to do all of that, its final hurdle would be authenticity. As a “jingle composer,” I know this challenge well. No matter how inspired my work is, if it’s coming from a company that specializes in jingles and a guy that does that for a living, it will seldom carry the weight of any artist’s work for a certain percentage of clients. Having written music in both contexts, I don’t believe that my spirit suddenly dies on commercial projects and soars on my passion projects, but I do believe that in the razor thin margins of subjective judgement about music, perception becomes reality. In fact, it became common for jingle houses to sign a few well-known artists to their roster to add luster, or—even more cynically—to invent identities for successful underscores to lend them more credibility. With the proliferation of sync licensing, I certainly see this bias going away down the road, but I have to imagine that when it comes to AI, most human beings would like to know that another human being wrote the music they are using. At least for now.

Outro

It’s been really fun trying to form coherent sentences around a half-life of instincts and lessons from the trenches. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them here, and wherever your career is headed, good luck and be yourself. One last bit of advice: Attaching files to emails… please… just stop. The kind folks at WeTransfer, Dropbox and the like, would love to offer you some free services.

Stuff I Learned Writing Music for Advertising—Problem Solver, Not Widget Maker

Posted on January 16, 2017 by - Columns

In my first post, I talked about many of the changes that technology has brought about in my industry and described a world where walls were evaporating. The problem with change, of course, is that it alters the playbook. During the early parts of my career, I benefited from being inside that exclusive world, where a large portion of advertising projects involved composers and original music.

Today, stock music—now more euphemistically called “production” music—is a huge business that leverages the democratization of music production technology, the ease of cloud storage and tag-based searching, and the growing and diverse needs of media creators for inexpensive solutions. If you just need some underscore in a certain genre, maybe with a build and an ending, your track is out there.

Simultaneously, the battered world of music publishers and record labels has been like a scrappy tree that grows sideways towards its one source of light. Not only are artists eager to place a wistful lost-love song underneath a diaper commercial, some of them are even considering the needs of advertisers and TV shows as they write. “Sync-friendly” is a real term in the business now!

So you can have a million options at your fingertips, all cheaper than original music, and you can license almost any song in your iTunes library, if you want the authenticity. Why incur the hassle of hiring a composer to write something from scratch? The answer to that exact question is the first thing I try to teach students I work with at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

The composer must become a partner in the creation of the whole piece of media.

The short answer is that some projects simply need to be written from scratch because of the specificity of the scoring needs or because they are conceptually unique. And while one could perhaps find production or licensed music, the road to the perfect score involves a whole bunch of thinking that hasn’t been done yet. Either way, the composer must become a partner in the creation of the whole piece of media, rather than simply the creator of a commodified piece of music that is used inside it. And the key to becoming that partner is understanding all of the different ways that music can function in a piece of advertising, and then helping to determine what is right for the task at hand. In short, it’s not the “what,” it’s the “why” when it comes to writing original music for advertising. So where do we start?

A Strategic Approach

Why does an ad use music? Television advertising grew out of radio advertising. Early radio advertising started as live sponsored announcements, much like the small segments we still hear on NPR. But as pre-recorded material became available, advertisers seized upon humanity’s most ancient memory technology and began to package messages within neatly crafted songs—jingles—and a medium was born. Look at television and streaming advertising now and it’s harder to find jingles, but they are still there. Think McDonalds’ current jingle, “I’m lovin’ it,” with its series of notes that immediately makes you think of the golden arches when you hear them played or sung. It’s primarily a catchy memory device. Secondarily, there are demographic and emotional reasons for what that melody is, who wrote it, and how it’s often arranged. In my experience, most advertising uses music for multiple reasons. Thankfully, agencies and brands are usually able to prioritize, either consciously in their creative briefs, or unconsciously in that mysterious process of choosing among multiple strong approaches created in the competitive demo phase. Figuring out what the strategy is behind a piece of music is, in my humble opinion, THE skill to develop to be successful doing this.

Here’s my cheat sheet:

1. Branding with Music and Lyrics

Fusing recognizable, unique musical events with a brand is a powerful way to make it stick. Something that is mentioned often by clients (so often that it’s a cliché) is the “other room test.” This is shorthand for saying that the music we write should be so good and so recognizable that if it’s on TV, you’ll recognize it even if you hear it from another room. Clients also love to ask for something as memorable as the Intel logo.

Functionally, I tend to split this strategy up into two tactics:

Music we write should be so recognizable that you’ll recognize it even if you hear it from another room.

Logo treatments/mnemonics are the musical versions of visual logos: a discrete sequence of notes or sounds, like that beloved Intel logo or the NBC chimes, that identify the brand. Over the years, I have found these are easy to write and hard to sell. They’re easy to write because they are like little puzzles that you have to solve. Most brands want to communicate something within that short moment: an emotion, a cultural space, a sense of modernity or tradition, so once you start trying to address those sub-motivations, it becomes a fun musical game. They are hard to sell, however, because clients often arrive with unrealistic expectations. How could you ever write something as recognizable as the Intel logo without the benefit of drilling it into people’s heads over a number of years?

I’d like to share two sonic logos that I helped create. The first is the ID for cable network American Movie Channel (AMC), and I would describe the approach as sound collage.

The second example is a recent Jell-O campaign that revived their historic melody from the 1950’s.

Jingles, in the traditional sense, are songs with lyrics that mention the brand by name and, through the magic of the lyricists, manage to tell a story or paint a picture of a brand. This tactic seemed to peek in the ‘70s and ‘80s and fall out of favor in the last couple decades, meaning that when they are done well now, they really stand out. I could share something I worked on more recently, but I think this is the perfect time to revisit a melody of my childhood:

2. Storytelling: Scoring the Mini-Film

As early as the ‘60s, advertising creatives realized that film and television were powerful storytelling media, and that perhaps rather than simply telling the audience that a product is great, a brand could present a short, digestible, and entertaining story as a Trojan horse for its message. While the point of the ad is still to sell the product or raise awareness, the job of the composer in this case is to treat it as a condensed film cue, drawing on whatever aesthetic and stylistic influences might be suggested by the story being told and the way it is being told. If the story is artfully conceived, the emotional and narrative inflection points will naturally drive home the message in subtle ways that an announcer or jingle can’t. In my experience, director’s treatments and storyboards are really helpful for understanding what needs to happen and how it needs to happen. For example, when looking at a director’s treatment, I can probably get a sense of whether this would be a Michael Bay action scene or a PT Anderson character study.  Each of these directors would select a distinctively different composer and musical approach.

I always love showing this long-running television commercial for GE, because it feels so much like charming moment in a a Disney or Pixar film.

For a different approach to scoring, here is an Oxfam Public Service Announcement that owes its visual language to the modern psychological thriller.

3. Emotional Response

There’s an imaginary line that most film scores stay behind. Transmitting the emotion of the scene is often the goal, whereas manipulating the viewer through hyperbolic emotional material might seem tacky, over-dramatic, or—even worse—dated. But in thirty seconds, there’s so little time for subtly and craft. And in advertising, manipulation just might be the goal and the music must be a blunt instrument, going directly for the viewer’s emotional gut. While some spots meditate on one feeling, many others take the shape of a problem/solution story: a problem is depicted, the product/service introduced, and voila, problem solved. This is very common in the ubiquitous category of pharmaceutical ads. While the shift from dark to light is certainly scoring, I see this as a unique strategy because it’s common that the client is looking for an emotion that goes beyond what we’re seeing in the story.

This Johnson & Johnson television commercial is a perfect example of creating one emotion, which I will call “heartstrings.” Notice how a feeling of warmth and humanity is created, and then the brand, by simply being there, benefits from that feeling.

This piece, for a large hospital network, is a great example of a subtle but powerful shift from tense to hopeful.

4. Brand Embodiment and Demographic Identification

“Well, I don’t really know about this, but if you tell me this is what the kids are listenin’ to, I’ll sign off on it!”

This is how I remember a senior officer (general?) signing off on my first big TV campaign for the US Army. I got that gig, my very first, primarily because I was 22 years old, going out clubbing, and listening to techno curated by my brother, who was a DJ at the time. I knew just enough about writing music to put down ideas that were closer to what I was listening to than anything they’d heard from other composers. The spot featured an edgy, young voice actor reading a pretty in-your-face call to action, and lots of hyper-saturated shots of technology. This was the late 1990s, during the “dot com” boom, and recruiting numbers were way down. The strategy of the campaign was clear: connect with young Americans and convince them that they could get a free and highly relevant education in technology by signing up. And in order to be heard, the Army felt they needed to break from previous campaigns rooted in proud, militaristic brass/orchestra/chorus, and speak the lingua franca of “the kids,” techno.

Thinking back, sure, there was thought given to creating an emotional feeling (excitement), and there were moments that artfully helped add drama to the story being presented in montage form (like when the music drops out as the skydivers jump from the helicopter). But for my money, the strongest motivating factor for the agency—evident in everything from the video edit, the hyped color correction, and the many rounds of demos of music—was to “rebrand” the Army as young and tech-savvy, and music was perhaps the strongest statement of that in the piece.

The music must be relatable to the intended audience.

I should note that in the last ten years, the most direct route towards doing this musically has been licensing an up-and-coming artist, leveraging the artist’s authenticity and removing any doubt about whether an original demo might be “of the moment.” But in my experience, this strategy is broad, deep, and often subtly superimposed on other strategies, even when it’s not the driving force. Regardless of the story or mood, just imagine a financial spot with a dubstep track or an energy drink spot with a Copland-inspired orchestral anthem! No matter what other strategies are at play, the music must be relatable to the intended audience, and this strategy is omnipresent in modern advertising.

5. Source (i.e. “diagetic music”)

This last strategy is the easiest to spot, but also the rarest. I’ve been lucky enough to work on a few projects requiring source music, and it’s always a fascinating process. Source music, also known as diagetic music, refers to music that exists in the world being portrayed on camera. Street performers and bar bands are a common example. Clock radios are also great examples, though those moments are more often solved by licensing something that might actually be on the radio. My favorite bit of source music is undoubtedly the “cantina” band in Star Wars, particularly because John Williams wrote something that felt alien yet relatable enough to help tell the story of where they were.

As a composer, the process of writing source music takes a completely different creative shape than any other process. To get it right, it’s one part ethnomusicology, one part composing, and one part method acting. You have to understand just what that ensemble would be playing at that moment, in that world, and then you have to pretend to be that composer until the music comes out. This strategy is less likely to mix with others, though it’s easy to imagine scenarios where the type of band portrayed on camera speaks to the audience demographic being targeted, or the emotion created by the piece is central to the scene making sense narratively.

I cannot tell you how much fun it was to work on this Florida Citrus spot, which involved two trips to Miami and Ricky Martin’s drummer. I’ll just leave it at that.

These are the broad strokes, and there are certainly areas like comedy that don’t follow the rules. Next week I’ll be back to talk about the scraps of certainty we start writing with—needledrops, creative briefs, and voice overs.

Still from U.S. Army ad scored by CO-PILOT featuring a group of enlisted men and the caption "Paid for by the U.S. Army"

Stuff I Learned Writing Music for Advertising—The Evolving Ecosystem and Tearing Down Walls

Posted on January 9, 2017 by - Columns

If the world of music for advertising and media is thought of as one big company, I’d argue it’s spent the last ten years converting to an open office plan.

Let me start at the beginning. I graduated from the University of Virginia in 1998 as a music and English major, and I had one goal when I moved to NYC: a job with the word “music” somewhere in the description that offered health insurance. Some networking, research, and lucky timing got me an interview for a coveted studio assistant position at a “jingle house.” Once I was allowed into that exclusive club, I made my future with some hard work, inspiration, communication skills, and by being in a supportive environment. Eighteen years later, I’ve had more music on TV than I can keep track of, though hardly anyone would know my name. But I still feel very lucky to have gotten in the door.

I’ve had more music on TV than I can keep track of, though hardly anyone would know my name.

On the other side of that door was a creative beehive of composing studios that shared a large live tracking room. The studios were nested in a larger open space that felt like an awesome loft apartment with a few extra desks. Each room was well-equipped with state of the art writing gear of its era: 2″ tape, a Synclavier, early ProTools rigs limited to 8 or 16 tracks, DA88 and DAT decks, outboard Akai and Emu samplers, sound modules, drum machines, compressors, and reverbs.

To be clear, I’m not digressing into gear nostalgia: I mention these tools because they were essential to creating believable demo recordings, and believable demos were—and still are—a requirement for winning a competitively bid ad gig. Zooming out, it’s also apparent in hindsight that having a flexible team of full-time composers in Midtown Manhattan was essential to serving our clients during the presentation and revision process. It would be a number of years before we’d be able to post a Dropbox link to a folder of Quicktime videos and mp3s. We received “picture” on 3/4″ video tape and sent our demos out on duplicated tapes called “laybacks.” We sent final mixes and “stripes” (i.e. split out parts or stems) on DAT tapes. When I worked on a Pontiac campaign in 1999, we even used a pricey company called Joyce, which messengered tapes to and from airplanes if we missed the FedEx cutoff!

The First Wall

Today I run a company called COPILOT that I formed with my longtime executive producer Jason Menkes in 2008.  When we started COPILOT, we imagined years later having a large facility and staff devoted to music for advertising. The reality is we’re still a small shop without a large studio, and we work on a lot more than advertising. We have a deep pool of composers, producers, musicians, singers, and engineers that we draw from to tackle projects of all sizes, but this talent can be located anywhere you can imagine having power and internet. Not only have we stayed in what we thought was “startup mode” for eight years, we’ve watched many larger competitors move in this direction: downsizing to less space and smaller full-time staff.

One of the most common anxieties I hear expressed by fellow composers with long track records of professional work for media goes something like this: “any kid with a laptop, some software, sample libraries, and a website can now try to be a jingle writer.”

This is the first wall that has evaporated: physical assets and financial hurdles, like studio gear and office space, and logistical requirements, like living in NYC or LA, were barriers of entry to aspiring composers. Today, where you live and what gear you own factor much less. This decentralization of the industry, by its very nature, invites more diversity and creates more opportunity for those inspired to work in this area. With a minimal amount of gear and software, a cell phone and an internet connection, you can be in the game, and your success becomes focused around your ideas, your relationships, and your reputation.

The decentralization of the industry invites more diversity and creates more opportunity for those inspired to work in this area.

There are always tradeoffs in transitions like this, and the biggest loss I see is the lack of professional mentorship opportunities. (Large central facilities create assistant positions.) This is one reason that I enjoy teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Arts so much. Still, I believe that dwindling mentorship opportunities are balanced by broadening opportunity. To me, the technological transformation of music production and collaboration has dissolved distinctions that once mattered greatly when looking for composers: professional/amateur, full-time/part-time, composer/singer/musician/engineer. Notwithstanding the sustainability of this model, a more inclusive industry is a better industry.

The Second Wall

Getting back to that Pontiac campaign… In 1999, television was how you reached a mass audience as an advertiser, and the thirty second spot was king. The price of media time reflected television’s reach and power, and so a brand had to be smart and focused about what it created. Also consider that the cost of creating polished visual media was extraordinary. Video production, editing, and visual effects, similar to audio production, required really expensive equipment, centralized in expensive facilities in NYC, LA, and other production hubs. Low budget visual production looked about as good as stock music from the time period sounded—which is not very good. So put these two factors together and big brands like Pontiac spent tons of money to make a dozen or so great spots each year. These ran everywhere all the time, their high creative and production values standing in stark contrast with the local furniture and mattress store ads.

Today it is not crazy to imagine a small new business or brand, perhaps a restaurant or a tech startup, producing a slick two-minute video introducing itself to the world via YouTube or Kickstarter. The production company could be a small, lightweight operation shooting with affordable DSLRs, perhaps working with a very experienced editor. Visual effects might come from overseas and there could even be judicious use of high quality stock footage. And the media time? By its nature, free. If it’s on the brand’s landing page, crowdfunding site, or YouTube channel, the only media expense is getting the eyeballs there.

Any and every brand can use polished video, often with original music.

The result of this transition? There are fewer opportunities to get a big jingle on TV, not to mention one with a healthy up front budget and union (AFM, SAG) residuals on the back end. But the flip side is that any and every brand can use polished video, often with original music. The amount of media being produced for marketing is increasing, and there will always be a chunk of that work that would truly benefit from original music. It will be more dispersed geographically and budgets will be all over the place, but it’s there and it’s growing, and that should be exciting for composers looking to make a career of their passion.

The Third Wall

One of the most important technological shifts to impact my industry is the decline in revenue from CD sales (and sluggish replacement of that revenue from digital downloads and streaming). My work for advertising has always been custom scored music that’s gone straight to the client as a buyout “work for hire” or been licensed. It has never existed on a CD or been posted to purchase or stream. So how does this affect me?

Ask where the money is. Sync is probably the first answer.

Speak to anyone in the music business, at a label or publisher, and ask that person where the money is. Sync is probably the first answer. On a recent sync podcast I was listening to, The Future of What, an indie label head casually said, “One good sync can make an artist’s year.” Another anecdote: attending the SXSW music festival in 2009 and then again in 2014, it was striking to me how many labels and publishers had shrunk in size in departments like A&R and publicity but staffed up in hiring representatives for sync licensing. Companies hadn’t shrunk in response to a sales slump; they had refocused on where the money still was.

Consider Neil Young’s “This Note’s For You” in 1988. The song’s lyrics epitomized the contempt that many artists had for the idea of “selling out.” Because album sales were such a cash cow, artists and labels used to see licensing as more of a mixed bag: what might be gained in additional money and exposure might be lost if the artist’s career is founded on authenticity and creative integrity. Seems almost quaint now. Sure, there are a few hold outs, and the largest artists still command astronomical fees, but the number of artists willing to license their work has greatly increased. The idea has become completely normalized. Fans expect their favorite artists to try to make a living in the era of streaming. Seizing upon this, labels and publishers have invested in people and technological platforms to make finding and clearing a song much easier. They are actively courting ad agencies, playing catered lunchtime showcases, and cozying up to gatekeepers like agency music producers.

On the other side of the budget spectrum, consider stock music libraries. Once thought of as a cheap alternative, libraries have grown exponentially in volume and quality thanks to the same changes in studio gear that opened the doors to original music. The ease of search and moving digital media has also enabled a host of non-exclusive “retitling” libraries to spring up, essentially crowd-sourcing with curation. Some of the top libraries have search features that rival places like Pandora when it comes to tagging music. As metadata and cloud library hosting streamline and standardize, it will be increasingly easier to monetize a piece you own through a music library.

So while it used to be that jingle writers were jingle writers, stock music composers were stock music composers, and artists were artists (and each group of people had a defined purpose and client base), I really think these categories are becoming more and more meaningless. That means that the creative needs of a project and the strength of relationships between collaborators can really drive who works on what and why. Exciting!

The Fourth Wall

Every year or two I am invited to speak to high school music students in West Hartford, Connecticut. One thing I try to drive home to all of these pliable young minds is that from my perspective, you should be willing and able to wear different hats over the course of your career. Just as the distinction between jingle writers, stock music composers, and artists are evaporating, so are other distinctions.

The democratization of studio technology has made it much easier to move between disciplines.

Composer, engineer, musician, singer, producer—these are all hats I’ve worn on various projects. The democratization of studio technology has made it much easier to move between disciplines. I’ve worked with several musicians over the years who started as session players and eventually ended up being composers on projects. As someone looking for composers, I’ve used this strategy when I know an instrument needs to be featured. Similarly, I’ve hired composers simply to sing remotely on other pieces, knowing their voice from hearing it on their own songs, and trusting their performing and engineering skills based on that relationship.

I certainly still believe in the value of focusing on one discipline and the amazing things that happen when you bring a singularly brilliant person onto a project, like a great mix engineer. But I definitely think that having almost everything possible on a laptop computer, we are now free to choose our areas of focus and knowledge, and I see people moonlighting, dabbling, playing, etc., with great results.

The Unbreakable Wall: Relationships, Reputation, and Saying Yes To Anything

I often think (perhaps naively), “How great were those walls for the previous generation! Once you got in the door, you were IN.”

I’ve been describing my industry—music for advertising—as a fluid, open ecosystem, in contrast with the exclusive club it seemed like when I began almost two decades ago. Yet I would still describe this business as extremely competitive, if not cutthroat. So the counterweight to all this freedom is that in addition to being talented and doing great work, building and maintaining relationships and reputation are now essential, ongoing skills that we need to survive as professionals.

Trust is perhaps the single asset that has replaced gear and location in this whole equation.

Starting my own company was a wake-up call. When I get called with a project, I’m generally operating out of some derivative of fear: Will our freelancers deliver what my client is hoping for and do so on time? Will they pick up their phones when changes are needed? While I regularly receive unsolicited emails from friendly and talented new composers that would like freelance work, in that Blink-like moment, my gut often goes for my most trusted composers, those who have delivered great work with drama-free communication in the past. Trust is perhaps the single asset that has replaced gear and location in this whole equation.

I’d love to hear your reactions, stories, and questions. I’ll be back here next week to talk more about the creative aspects of what I do.

Ravi Krishnaswami is Co-Owner, Creative Director and Lead Composer at COPILOT Music + Sound, a music production company based in NYC, and a faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts in the Music Composition MFA program. Krishnaswami also performs regularly as the guitarist in The Sons & Heirs, NYC’s tribute to The Smiths and Morrissey.