3. Licensing
There are a countless number of films using licensed music, it is a very common scenario. Actually, it is even pretty rare that this doesn't happen in films, from Quentin Tarantino’s movies using no original scores at all, to movies like Lost In Translation who licensed My Bloody Valentine’s Sometimes. The soundtrack is meant to be a musical accompaniment to the project, not a demonstration of the composer’s mastery at everything, nailing background and foreground music as well as songs or period pieces. If that is the case, wonderful, you may have saved licensing money on the budget, but in reality, it is far more efficient to get the real deal for what you want rather than expect the composer to master something they cannot. If you are doing a project set in the Baroque era, it will be faster, more efficient and less frustrating to license baroque pieces from a library. If your temporary soundtrack includes songs from a specific band that you really like, and you are getting more and more used to watching the film with those songs, it will be nearly impossible to replace. Expecting the composer to be that person is a trap for them.
The best solution to that conundrum is to license the piece of music as soon as possible. If the music is cheap then it will bring peace of mind, if the piece is not affordable, then there will be plenty of time left to find a different option. Too many times there have been situations where the licensing paperwork had not been filed early in the process and it created unsolvable issues. Whether it is a director getting attached to a piece of music just to learn a week before the DCP that it is way out of reach, therefore asking to the composer to create something similar, but there is no such thing as a similar sound to the Rolling Stones’s Satisfaction for example. Or situations where the licensing fees were raised because the paperwork was not signed at the time the price was good and the song became a hit later.
The licensing process is particularly annoying but, just like taxes, there are professionals who take care of that: music supervisors. And as annoying as it certainly is, it remains less painful to do it early with assistance rather than procrastinate and have to do twice more research later to replace the track because it is far more expensive than expected.
One more factor to keep in mind (unless dealing with professional publicists who will ask the right questions and submit a specific price for a piece in a specific distribution setting), if you are dealing with online libraries, do not forget to select the correct distribution scale (from private release to multimillions views) and pay the appropriate fee. It happens that musicians’s performing right organizations check those deals and fine frauds heavily.
Some of the basic royalty-free online libraries include AudioJungle, Pond5, YouTube. The more premium options include Musicbed, Marmoset, Artist.io. And the best options are the curated ones, like West Channel, or often you can ask for a specific composer’s personal library.
Comments, suggestions, experiences you had with composers, and consequent advice for others are encouraged.
This blog will be updated with new experiences and illustrations as they occur.