Music supervisor is a term for somebody who’s in charge of finding and processing musical information for particular projects. That’s the easiest way to put it. In advertising, they will be called a musical producer or an executive musical producer. But it’s a similar process in terms of what they do.
A musical supervisor will come and say, “I’ve got this deal. This is what the structure is. This is how much we want to pay. Do you have any songs that will work?” And then, we’ll send the musical supervisor some selections.
It’s sort of like throwing darts at a dartboard. I wouldn’t say that it starts against the wall, where you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s throwing darts at a dartboard. And we say, “OK, well, we know what the supervisor wants. We can hit that. We think we can hit it well.” Then, we just basically wait for the supervisor to process it. We just have an ongoing dialogue with them to talk about whether or not it works. If it works, then we do a deal. If it doesn’t, we don’t. It’s fairly simple business, but there’s a lot of intellectual property stuff in the background that’s not quite so simple.
This position is sort of the central point in the music industry for a particular production when it comes to everything musical. Sometimes, that means that they also act as a musical director and not just as a supervisor. And what I mean by that is a musical director, being somebody who will coach actors on how to sing properly for camera, how to lip-sync, or if they need to lip-sync. We’ll work with composers, if needed, to bring together custom work that needs to be done. So there are a lot of things that a supervisor touches on. But really, if you want to think about the supervisor from your perspective, that’s the person to connect with either directly or through a sync agent, a label, or publisher or other entity, to get your music connected to a project and then possibly get it used.
In that role, the supervisor is sort of a central musical point. That’s the easiest way to understand it. Now, there’s one thing I want to talk about here when it comes to supervisors that a lot of people may not know. Basically, the supervisor is only one voice. A lot of the time, they don’t have the ultimate control of approval, or they are not the ultimate decision-maker when it comes to the usage of musical information.
A lot of the time when you’ve submitted musical data to a supervisor, or someone has on your behalf, and it seems like everything’s going well but then it stops, people naturally get really frustrated. And they’re like, “What? You know, the supervisor told us that it was great. I don’t know what’s going on. What’s wrong with these people? They’re totally crazy.”
But they’re not totally crazy. They’re not the person who’s the ultimate decider a lot of the time. The ultimate decider is the person who writes–the people who write the show, the showrunner, the director in a film, or the creative head at an advertising firm. Or it could be a producer, somebody who is at a brand for an advertising company, or somebody high up at the studio in marketing, who just said, “That’s just not resonating with us. We don’t want it.”
So there are a thousand reasons why something that you’ve submitted to a supervisor may not actually happen. I just want to say that, because a lot of people think that the supervisor is like some kind of god. However, a lot of the time, the supervisor is trying to do the best job that they can for their bosses. And the reason that I’m telling you all of this is that there’s an end game for you.
And the end game for you is to say to yourself, “How can I be of service to this supervisor? How can I help them to solve a problem?” That’s your job outside of your music education if you want to step up and deal with supervisors directly. Or a good sync agent would say the same thing, which is, “How do I solve a problem for a supervisor?” And you know what? If you can solve that problem, you’ve got to be honest with yourself about your music and about what you can do, and say, “OK, I can solve that problem!” And then you solve it.
If you can’t solve the problem, don’t send the supervisor something that will set you up for failure. I’ve seen it done time and time again. I see a lot of the time that people will know that a supervisor is busy with several tasks, and they’ll send them musical data that will never work for anything they do, which is the kiss of death in everything.
If there’s a supervisor who is working on a project where everything sounds like it’s very ’80s and you send them some current hip-hop verses, maybe something that sounds like Kurtis Blow or LL Cool J, then you’re going to set yourself up for failure because that’s not what the job of the day is. The job of the sound is to emphasize what the story is. You’ve got to take a look at what kind of stories are being told and what the supervisors are looking to enhance with your contribution. So your creation, as good as it may be, is not always going to be the best thing for the particular job.
Let’s talk from generalities first in terms of how you make your music licensable. Then, we can talk about how you present it because there are two parts of the equation. How you present is extremely important, but before that, let’s talk about what you need to do to make sure that everything is packaged correctly and that when you present it to a supervisor or somebody who’s representing you, you’re truly putting your best foot forward rather than setting yourself up for failure.
Now, the first thing is you’ve just got to create a really good sound. I’m just going to keep on saying that because that’s the most important thing that you need to do. Without really good musical compositions, nothing will happen, so you’ve got to make your sound the best it can be.
Also, you’ve got to make sure that anything that you submit is mastered and mixed correctly. You can’t give somebody something that’s a demo that you’re working on that’s really sort of a rough edit. You’ve got to have things that are ready to go and really represent you the best that they can. That’s probably the most important thing to remember as you continue your online music education, that you have to put in 100% of your effort.
Now, if you do have a relationship with somebody that has developed over time and you’re working on something, then, yeah, of course, just like any other relationship, you can say, “Hey, I’ve been working on this, what do you think? Do you think I should really go for it? Or what do you think of the direction of this?” That’s fine if you have a long-term relationship with a supervisor or with a sync agent or a label or publisher.
But let’s assume you don’t. Make sure that everything is mastered. That’s the number one rule that I’m going to say because I don’t think that people say it enough. They always talk about things like my next subject, which is metadata.
