While no one can give an exact percentage, agency music producers concur that licensed music has grown to be a big part of the creative mix, offering an increasingly viable alternative to the tradition of commissioning ori-ginal music production for commercials. What they also agree on is that the trend toward music licensing is driven by aggressive marketing and promotion from a music recording industry hard hit by decreases in CD sales over the last few years.
Moreover, with all that licensed music floating around, copyright issues are at the forefront, requiring agency music producers to educate themselves and their creative and production teams on the matter. Copyright infringement, however, is not a new issue, as a steadily growing number of claims by record labels and publishers against music in commercials has motivated the Association of Music Producers (AMP) to lead the charge to educate the commercial production community on the risks of temporarily scoring unfinished spots or animatics with unlicensed music for editorial or demonstrative purposes. To that end, AMP has held a series of seminars around the country to educate agency music producers, producers and creatives about the risks of "temp tracks." Music companies are also talking about "pre-scoring," which allows companies to get involved in a project earlier, and create a score that doesn’t sound like or resemble an existing piece of music.
"I don’t know what the percentages are," states James Mahoney, music director at Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB), Chicago, "but from my vantage point, it is amazing how aggressive record labels are getting with pursuing the notion of licensing in a friendlier manner. And it is not just the major labels, the independent labels are getting pretty savvy about it too. It is really interesting to see what has happened in the wake of Moby and his success with licensing music to commercials. He got some credibility, and it has really opened up the doors, so I can only imagine that the percentage [of artists willing to license their work] is going up."
Gregory Grene, a music producer at FCB, New York, agrees that licensed music use is on the rise. "There is an attraction to what used to be completely unaffordable," he says. "[Licensed music] had such a stigma that real artists would not let their work be used in a commercial. Now, literally every artist is licensing their music for advertising. There has also been a big effort by the record companies to make licensing more affordable.
"There is a feeling that licensed music is the real deal and anything else is a lesser beast, but I don’t feel that way," Grene continues. "What I ask is, ‘Is the music grabbing us? Is this what we need to make the spot work?’ "
There is certainly a trend from original music to more licensing, acknowledges Karl Westman, senior partner/executive music producer at Ogilvy & Mather, New York. "It has become a very potent way to use music to brand," he says of licensing tracks from recording artists. "You gain the equity that comes from recognizable or just simply fantastic music to brand, and it works very well. We sometimes use licensed music, first of all because it works and then secondly, we are in a business where we have to recognize trends. There is definitely a synergy between advertising and marketing by using the entertainment industry. Also, the recording industry is not in great health, and so they are using our industry as a way to catapult artists. Ultimately, however, it is all about the work. To put a piece of licensed music on a spot for no apparent reason is just following the trend blindly."
"Now when people come up with ideas, it involves looking for songs that already exist," adds Ira Antelis, head of music at Leo Burnett USA, Chicago. "It is now part of the mix of things. Baby boomers and others remember songs [from their eras], and so it is about using a familiarity to get audience. You are not hearing too many songs that were written in 1995 and 1996, for example. … It is all about trying to hit the baby boom generation."
What it all gets down to in the final analysis is that music producers have more options to choose from. "Licensed music is beginning to settle into its niche," says Peter Greco, senior partner/executive music producer at Young & Rubicam, New York. "I don’t ever see licensed music doing away with original music—real, original music is really the lifeblood of our industry. What licensing has done is augment the musical possibilities. Certainly, there is a lot more of it due to the fact that the record industry is in such dire straights. All of a sudden, they have discovered advertising as a new, important partner. We are inundated with proposals, CDs, and catalogues. [They want us] to fill up the part of their budget that is being lost to [decreasing] CD sales."
Greco notes that he tends to use original music and licensed music about equally. According to him, the bottom line is that the choice of music should be dictated by the creative concept behind a spot or campaign. "Most of this year, I have worked on AT&T projects, and it has been great because it has required some licensing of masters," he says. "We acquired a Sheryl Crow song master when it was required. In another case, we bought the rights to a Sinéad O’Connor song, but I got David Crosby to re-record it, which put a wonderful new spin on it. Using both balanced the whole campaign and made it fresh. There was never a great mandate for one or the other."
Repetition
Despite its potential, licensed music is far from a panacea. "The problem with licensing in my own personal experience is there is a lot of it going on, and so many of the same songs are now being recycled," says Greco. "Consequently, the attachment to certain products or services is kind of neutered, which becomes a problem because you start to lose the whole branding aspect."
Westman notes that there will always be a place for original music. "The production music houses have been affected," he says, "and there are some opportunities for them to take advantage of covers when we do not buy the master. There is probably less jingle work, less singing, but there is still always a place for underscores and covers of licensed music. In my world, licensed music is more apparent, but I still find myself in the studio a lot. If you look at places where licensed music is not appropriate, there is still a lot of music production going on."
Grene acknowledges that companies that create original music and sound design have had a hard time with the increasing use of licensed music, and have had to find ways to compete with record labels. "I’d like to see them put together something like any one of the big award shows," he says. "Music is just as important as any other aspect of the commercial production, and somehow they ended up on the short end of the stick. They need to do an evening that will increase their visibility."
Get it (copy) right
Meanwhile, guarding against copyright infringement has become an ongoing issue. "It is one of our functions as music producers—we are here to be gatekeepers," relates Greco, who adds that licensing a song is not necessarily as simple as it seems, depending on what exactly has been licensed. "We know, however, that it is an ever-changing landscape, and there are more lawsuits out there than a year ago," he continues. "You may buy the notes on a piece of paper, but you need to stay clear of recreating an artist likeness or even a likeness of the recorded master or arrangement, so you have to educate clients on the fact that they have bought the song, and now have to put a completely different spin on it, and rearrange it in a way that is not representing the original work. Sometimes clients understand that, and sometimes they don’t."
Greco also points to the legal gray area of the use of temp tracks, which is something that pre-scoring—i.e., having a music company create a track before the spot goes to an editor to be cut—could help eliminate. "Pre-scoring has been a movement within the music companies in the industry to avoid their being put in the situation of being brought into a project with a piece of temp music. … Music companies have said, ‘Bring us in as soon as possible and we will provide you scores, direction and music in our own library to circumvent them being put into a legally difficult situation.’ "
Grene is a big fan of pre-scoring. "If it is at all possible, it is absolutely the way to go," he says. "Pre-scoring is the best of all possible worlds, and it can be amazing if you get folks actually doing it at the time of the boards. But you can also get people doing it when they first come back to the editors. It is possible to edit to original music instead of editing to something you happen to have lying around."
Antelis notes that the idea of pre-scoring is not new. "A lot of time people have ideas about a commercial, and sometimes the easiest way to present that idea is with the music," he says. "You can’t go shoot it, but you can get a fair representation from a music company and then present the idea with the music to the client. That happens all the time."
Another advocate of pre-scoring is Rani Vaz, senior VP/director of music and radio production at BBDO New York. "Pre-scoring is a very high priority with us," she says. "When there is original music production, the time frame is always so crunched … and music can be the last thing that is approached. At the BBDO music department, we really want to get music thought about early in the process. That is the biggest change in the last couple of years."
When asked about the trend toward more licensed music in commercials, Vaz dismisses the question as old news. "Licensed music has been talked about so much that it becomes ‘let’s move onto how we can all work more productively,’ " she notes. "It is about getting a project done the most creative and efficient—and fun—way [possible]."
