Advertising

For Dean Muhsin, the decision to license music to an advertising agency is something that has to be weighed carefully. "Everybody wants to discover records, to have ownership of them, and there's no great feeling of discovery if it's being pumped out at 3 PM on kids' TV," he says. Therefore, when Tesco clothing label F&F asked to use a track by Huxley, it was considered crucial that he was already established and that F&F wanted to use "I Want You," a deeper cut from his 2014 album. "It was never going to look like a cheap move," says Muhsin.Nonetheless, it was a long conversation, with Muhsin well aware of the criticism that such syncs can come in for and how difficult it is in the current climate to decline such income. Depending on how many territories it's broadcast in, the platforms it's used on (TV, radio, cinema, online) and the campaign's length, an advert sync will typically generate from £5,000 (UK TV campaign, unknown artist) to over £80,000 for a global six-month run.By simultaneously pushing sales of the licenced track—some deals will include, for instance, a visible track credit on the advert or an embedded click-to-buy link on YouTube—labels can double the value of such sync deals. According to marketing magazine, the F&F advert was the sixth-most Shazam'd ad in the UK in the first week of May 2015. "You're given a schedule of when, where and what TVs shows [the advert will air around], and bigger independent labels have digital marketing teams who sync up targeted social media advertising around the high-impact points," says Muhsin.Sync deals can come through unusual channels—one contributor to this feature bagged a spot on a yoghurt commercial after meeting a friend of his wife's at a wedding—but generally ad agencies send out regular requests to music publishers, labels and management companies. Getting onto those mailing lists is a matter of hustling, good contacts and repeatedly delivering useful material.Ad agencies are constantly looking for existing catalogue tracks and, less often, they will commission original music. In the first case, pitching is a simple matter of sending over streams via SoundCloud. Where original music is required, ad agencies will sift through potential candidates before asking a small number to pitch a demo, for which the artist is usually paid a nominal fee. The artist may have as little as a day to put that demo together.In both cases, acting on behalf of its client, the agency will supply a brief. "The majority are, 'We want this track but we can't afford it,'" says Simon Pursehouse, director of music services at publishers Sentric. "I don't mind that because immediately you can get a sense of what they're after." It gets more difficult, says Muhsin, when "an ad exec who doesn't have a clue about music tries to describe the track they've picked, and you get loads of contradictory info. Or you get a poor open-brief, which does no one any favours because they end up flooded with unsuitable stuff.""One that I did, all it said was, 'It needs to be an artistic statement,'" says Ragsdale, who writes music for clients such as BMW and Prada. "Then you get ones that are ultra specific about what they want to happen at 'hit points' in the visuals, how it should make the audience feel, what the brand wants to achieve, with ten different example pieces of music. It's your job to sift all that and not be overwhelmed by it. I read the notes, digest the references and then take ten minutes to forget it all, start to jam and see what comes out. Otherwise, you end up making some horrible, bastardised amalgamation of everything."

Thomas Ragsdale

Unlike TV, with adverts artists can often prevent their work from being used. If licensing a pre-existing track, the ad agency must get permission from the mechanical copyright holder (usually the artist or label) and the artist's publisher. This is done on a so-called "most favoured nations" basis, where each party is paid an equal fee. However, standard record label/publishing contracts often allow them to fully exploit the artist's music in any sphere, which essentially pre-approves any advertising usage, unless the artist pushes to include detailed caveats. Unlike standard publishing deals (usually 80:20 in the artist's favour), sync deals are usually nearer 50:50.Deciding how much time to devote to such work and what to pitch for is a learning process says Fin Greenall, AKA Ninja Tune's Fink, an artist whose work has taken in everything from drum & bass to folk. "Early on, when money's tight, you beat yourself over the head because one 15 or 25 grand TV ad would be a life-changer," he says. Greenall's first sync, with Mastercard in 2006, helped get him out of the serious debt incurred in the recording and touring of hisalbum. "Everyone in my team, including Ninja Tune, went, 'Thank fucking god for that.'""I did a huge one for Facebook years ago and I was certain I'd got it," says Greenall. "It was perfect: grand piano, string quartet, I threw the bank at it. In the end, they went with the original option. After a few years, you begin to differentiate between the wastes of time and those you have a shot at. Generally, when we get the brief, if it sounds exactly like what I do—say they want an alt-folk, male vocal, gritty with a bluesy edge—my management will chuck it at me. If they want Skrillex-meets-opera, they won't. But ten years ago, I'd have tried it."While not as rewarding as making your own music, Ragsdale says fulfilling briefs can be satisfying. This is particularly true now that the hipper ad agencies will come to him looking for music on a spectrum from Zomby or Andy Stott to Nils Frahm, rather than the cheesier dance music reference points that used to be common. "The journey from conception to final product is a day," he says. "It's really quick-fire, and if someone is pleased with that—somebody who isn't musical—who is willing to pay you more money than you would ever get gigging, it still gets you. Although, it's rare that someone will like it straight away. The back and forth is crazy. It can take weeks. They might change the visuals, have a complete rebrand. I've even had, 'Thanks for your submission, but we've decided on having no music at all.'"Be it rejecting jobs where the ad agency wants to write the lyrics, or declining sound-a-likes where he's asked to mimic Cat Stevens or Bob Dylan, Greenall has gradually settled on criteria for ad work that suits him. "Unless you're advertising Halliburton or Monsanto, I don't see a downside to someone saying, 'Can you spend a couple of days, do a track like all your other tracks, and we'll give you 20 grand.' If that's like a year's wages to you, you'd be an idiot to say no. And it's time well spent. If they [reject your track], I've just done two days' awesome studio work that I can recycle in a remix or a Fink track."The downside is if you're doing more TV ads than songs. Then, to be honest, you're making music for TV ads. You're not really an artist anymore. That's a slippery slope because every good idea you use for someone else you don't use for yourself. This happened a lot with remixes in the 1990s. We'd all pay the bills by doing mixes, but some acts would just remix themselves out. You've got to be really careful with the TV ad world because it's all about the money. It's not about the art."