I was thrilled to speak about production music (also known as ‘library music’) on a panel called Production Values last year at Sensoria Festival. I joined Steve Rosie, who’s Senior Music Consultant at De Wolfe, and Matt Wanstall from the Musician’s Union.
We talk about:
- What Production Music actually is.
- The way that Production Music is used.
- What it’s like to be a composer working in Production Music.
- The guidelines, requirements and specifications that you often need to fulfill for production libraries.
- The technical skills needed to create polished music fit for production libraries and ‘just in time learning’.
- The pros and cons of collaboration with both instrumental musicians and composers in terms of creativity and time and budget.
- Your reasons for writing library music.
- The latest, popular music style trends.
- How library licensing works in the UK – MCPS vs non-MCPS.
- The different ways that individuals and companies can license music from libraries.
- The multiple income streams that library music generates.
- The different sorts of deals composers get from production libraries and our recommendations for what’s a good deal and what’s not so good.
We also touched on what happens when your music gets used on a production you’d rather it hadn’t, and we also had an interesting discussion about what we all think about music AI (hint: it’s not all bad).
Enjoy!
Photo credit: Laura Merrill