By Fred Cisterna

With more and more agencies using licensed music for spots, production music libraries and publishing companies are streamlining the music acquisition process. Improving online access plays a major role in these advances. Web site offerings include increasingly sophisticated search systems, more tracks available for downloading and project management tools. Even clients who prefer the physicality of CDs will often utilize a music library’s Web site in the course of procuring licensed music for an ad.

Bicoastal Associated Production Music (APM), which has more than 175,000 tracks available for licensing, recently launched MyAPM, a Web-based music management portal that offers an advanced search system, a number of project management features and downloading capabilities. (In February, APM added London-headquartered West One Music to the roster of libraries it represents.)

"The MyAPM system goes way beyond a traditional search engine," relates Adam Taylor, president of APM. Rather than working like an ordinary search engine, which offers users a massive list of results, the MyAPM portal allows for more specific results. Taylor notes that a search producing a varied list "has been tried by a lot of different people, and we find that that is not very effective."

APM has four full-time in-house music directors who work directly with clients. "What we tried to do was emulate that experience online," Taylor says. "What a music director essentially does is recommend a track or a set of tracks. We actually have a recommended track structure where we pick—for each of the many, many thousands of iterations of potential search criteria—certain CDs and certain tracks for each of those searches."

In addition to having free text search capabilities, MyAPM features guided searches through 54 main categories and 2,018 sub-categories. Currently, sub-sub-categories are being added to the system. The full MyAPM system will be unveiled later this month at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas. "The other functionality that we’ve built is a search-on-search," Taylor adds. "Once you get your first result, you can then execute another search just from that first criteria to narrow it down further." Once music tracks are chosen, they can be downloaded as MP3s or as uncompressed WAV files, which can be used directly with an Avid. Clients can also order CDs containing the tracks or external drives with the desired selections.

Spotmaking is a team-oriented process, and MyAPM’s project management features were set up with that in mind. The portal allows clients to store search results in folders organized by scene, project or list. The user can then share tracks and notes with collaborators. "What we really try to do is understand the work flow and facilitate easy methods for sharing information and getting approvals," says Taylor. "We feel like we are saving people time."

MyAPM even cuts down on paperwork. "Once you want to report the usage of [a track], you click on a button and it opens up a list of reports," Taylor explains. "If you want to do a cue sheet or an online report to indicate that you used the music, the fields are automatically populated. They’re already filled out—the name of the track, all of the publishing information, the name of the project. You click one more button and it goes to us or to whoever else you want it to go to."

Taylor says that MyAPM’s search function is based on the PLAY search system, which was originally developed by U.K.-based KPM, a music library represented by APM in the U.S. and Canada. APM plans to have its entire library available via MyAPM by May 1. Currently, more than 3,000 clients are signed up for APM’s Web site via the PLAYAPM search system; about half of the library’s collection is available on the Web through that system.

What is the most popular form of music delivery for APM clients? "For agency personnel, it is still primarily CDs, but more and more people are getting into the online [system]," states Taylor. "We’re finding that postproduction facilities are probably taking the lead in using the online system. We’re also finding that the big networks—cable and broadcast—are going to big internal servers. We’re giving them all of our music files and metadata—and our search capability—and they use that internally." Recently, APM has provided ad music for Travelocity, Verizon Wireless, Canon copiers and AT&T Wireless.

Delivery

Emi musicResources, New York, a division of London-headquartered EMI Publishing, has more than 500,000 searchable songs on its Web site, which includes project management as one of its many features. Clients can download search results as 192 kbs MP3s, then save and burn samples. The division has recently provided music for Canon, AT&T and K-Mart commercials.

"We constantly review and improve our delivery system," says John Melillo, VP/head of emi musicResources. "Web-based tools are used increasingly for final versions; however, most times this last pass is done on CD. The overwhelming majority of emi musicResources business is spotwork. Generally, agency folk seem to prefer CDs for long-term reference, and, increasingly, online delivery for current projects."

Megatrax, North Hollywood, has more than 150 CDs of musical material in its library and 20 new CDs in production. Recent jobs include providing music for Visa, RadioShack, Crayola, Honda and Frontier Airlines spots. "We’re seeing a steady increase in hard drive delivery, either in WAV or AIFF format," says Ron Mendelsohn, co-founder/ CEO/composer at Megatrax. "We’re seeing a real increase simply because people are inundated with more and more library CDs, and they need a way to organize it all and to access it. The easiest way to do that is if it’s in some kind of digital format like a hard drive where they can sort it and search it and drop it into their edit sessions quickly."

While more users are utilizing online systems, Mendelsohn notes that "CDs are far and away the primary delivery format. There’s no question about that. Upwards of ninety percent of our licenses directly come off of CDs. But within that other ten percent we are seeing a steady increase in hard drive delivery and also in digital download from our various Web sites.

"Hard drive delivery is something that appeals to clients who go through a very large volume of music," adds Mendelsohn. "It mainly applies to post houses, broadcast facilities and those kind of facilities that go through a lot of music in a very short amount of time. Ad agencies [on the other hand] would probably be more inclined just to download tracks individually from the Web site."

Megatrax.com uses Music Source as a search system, which "allows clients to download tracks in WAV format or Windows Media format," explains Mendelsohn. "And we also just recently developed a second Web site [Playmegatrax. com] that has a completely different search system and allows clients to download music in WAV, AIFF or MP3 formats."

Megatrax also plans to overhaul its older Web site—mainly in terms of the way the music is categorized—to make it easier to access tracks and keep them up to date, according to Mendelsohn.

Ten Music, Santa Monica, offers a hard drive with a searchable database known as HANK, which contains about 2,800 songs. The company’s roster of 18 labels and four publishers has about 17,000 tracks. Labels include Denmark-based Bad Afro (rock); Compost, which is based in Munich, Germany (electronica); Vanguard Records, New York (country, bluegrass, blues, jazz and folk); and Eighteenth Street Lounge (ESL) Music, headquartered in Washington, D.C. (downtempo). Recently, Ten signed the Toronto-based indie rock label Arts & Crafts, whose artists include Broken Social Scene and Stars. Recent spots for Nissan ("Lost," out of the True Agency, Los Angeles, and directed by Francois Girard of Independent Media, Santa Monica), Powerade, Ford and Ban have used music provided by Ten.

Ten Music used to primarily focus on working with editorial shops. "Right now, we focus on agencies as well, on a project basis," says creative director Sarah Sciotto-Gavigan. If an agency is working at an editorial shop that has HANK, such as Final Cut, New York, or the U.S. offices of The Whitehouse, which are in New York, Chicago, and Santa Monica, Ten will send along tracks for the agency to consider licensing. Additionally, if an editorial house doesn’t have HANK, Ten will send the hard drive system to the shop. "In some cases," Sciotto-Gavigan adds, "the agencies have enjoyed using it at the editorial facility, so the creatives enjoy using it when they’re concepting."

Sciotto-Gavigan says Ten is currently in the process of further developing the database. "We will have an finitely more global presence in about six to eight months," she reports. "I think this database will be the workhorse of the company."

In the near future, HANK will also be part of the company’s online setup. "Right now, our site is purely utilitarian, but all of that will soon change," says Sciotto-Gavigan. "The whole purpose of the database is to empower creatives and editors to find music that matches their picture while they’re in the process of making the job. The role of a music supervisor in commercials right now is not really that of a supervisor. It’s more of a person who’s just pulling music tracks and sending them to the agency. The creatives and the editors are really the music supervisors."

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