Music Supervisors Are Essential to Syching Music to Visual Media, and Demand is Rising

Josh Sutherland BM ’19 was up against the clock. A music supervisor for the NFL, he was working to clear a package of songs that would accompany players as they walked out for the draft. The one he really wanted to license was a new song, “TEKA”—a catchy electronic track with a driving beat by DJ Snake and Peso Pluma. 

The only problem was that the track was so new that not all of the rights for it were settled. “So many artists have friends, producers, and managers that are involved in the writing process,” Sutherland says—in this case, 11 writers and seven publishers just for this one song. With the draft days away, Sutherland set to work, negotiating separately with each rightsholder. One owned just 0.5% of the song. In the end, he was able to clear the song in the nick of time.

It wasn’t the first time Sutherland had to play detective and diplomat in the name of getting the rights to a track. “More often than not, you find out people own a certain percentage of a song, and you have to do the digging, stalking them to get them to respond,” says Sutherland, who helped oversee music for Max’s Euphoria and Rap Sh!t. “And they may want a little more money, so you’ve got to put your budgeting and negotiating skills to use.”

Invisible but Essential  

Sinking into the couch and flicking on the latest movie or show on Netflix or Amazon Prime, we may take for granted the soundtracks that lilt or pump behind the action on-screen, but every bit of music that appears on our screens is there because of a music supervisor, who both consults with the director or showrunner to choose songs and then performs the painstaking behind-the-scenes work to clear the rights to use them.

“A music supervisor is a bridge between the creative and administrative,” says Christopher Wares, assistant chair of Berklee’s Music Business/Management Department. “They have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of music and genres, as well as a deep understanding of who controls the publishing rights.” 

Also known as “sync,” music supervision includes overseeing the synchronization between music and some form of visual media. With the increasing number of shows on streaming channels such as Apple TV+, Hulu, Paramount+, and Peacock, music supervisors have become highly sought-after, and the field is increasingly attractive to those who love both music and visual media. As music proliferates into more and more forms of media, the field has expanded into advertising, sports, video games, social media, virtual-reality experiences, and even exercise equipment. “If you are on a bike watching a class and music is playing in the background, a music supervisor was involved in making that happen,” Wares says.

While a director sometimes has a clear view of the music they want, and only needs the supervisor to clear the rights, for others a supervisor is a true collaborator in coming up with the musical signature of the project, says Thomas Golubic, a veteran who has worked on shows including Six Feet Under, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The Walking Dead. 

“We are brought in by the network to essentially build out the soundscape for a TV show or film,” says Professor LaMarcus Miller, who worked as a music supervisor for The Wonder Years and RapCaviar Presents, and recently for a documentary on Jim Henson and the Muppets. He also served as head of operations for the Guild of Music Supervisors in 2023. 

For Six Feet Under, Golubic made playlists for each of the characters to help him get inside their heads. “The process really helps you think deeply about a character—what is it that really moves them,” he says. Sometimes the task of a music supervisor can get quite complicated, as with a recent episode of the show Poker Face, a crime procedural with a “case-of-the-week” structure. Showrunner Rian Johnson created a plot involving a band with a hit song ripped off from the theme of the ’80s sitcom Benson. “We had to figure out how to clear the existing copyright, and then hire a band to write a new song similar to it, but also viable as a hit,” says Golubic, who has come to Berklee several times to present to students. 

Copyright comprises two separate parts: the publishing rights to the composition and the performance rights to the recording. While sometimes a supervisor can go to a label for “one-stop” rights, more often they need to play sleuth, first scouring databases such as ASCAP or BMI and then branching out to internet searches and phone calls to track down owners. “I’ve made some insane Sherlock Holmes moves—for example, calling someone’s second cousin’s church—because I’m looking to clear an arrangement,” says Sami Posner ’13, a freelance music supervisor with Blue Lily Music.

After tracking down rightsholders, music supervisors then need to negotiate rates, which can vary wildly depending on how long the song will be used and in what context, as well as where the broadcast will air. Sometimes, Miller says, music supervisors need to square a creator’s lofty ideas with the reality of how much the desired music actually costs. A lesser-known artist used in the background might cost $5,000 all-in. But a recognizable artist can cost between $40,000 and $60,000, while a major-label artist such as Michael Jackson, The Beatles, or Beyoncé can easily run six figures. 

Major advertisers are often willing to pay big money to use pieces from well-known artists, or to hire orchestras to record original compositions. “Since commercials are so short, music can really be the idea—everything can center around a particular lyric or musical motif or choreography,” says Abbey Hendrix BM ’13, a music supervisor with Apple. 

Last year she produced a spot showcasing the iPhone’s accessibility features using the Spinifex Gum song “The Greatest,” a defiant anthem set over a pounding beat. She reworked the song using vocals from an Australian youth chorus, then interspersed quotes from Muhammad Ali. The spot won an Emmy last year for best commercial. “When it locks in, it feels great,” Hendrix says. “You can make a great ad that people remember forever.”

Sports television and reality television rely on subscription libraries of music composed specially for sync. Catherine Pastrana MA ’17 used such libraries in her work as a supervisor for ESPN, making mini-documentaries about sports figures. She’d write down the emotions she felt reading through the scripts and then search for music to fit them. For a documentary about professional weight lifter Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson—who played the character Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane on Game of Thrones—she noted that much of the imagery of his Icelandic home was sparse and frigid, so she searched for cold, even melancholy, music to create the film’s mood.

Music supervisors increasingly rely on a number of technologies to help them navigate these libraries and pinpoint the exact tunes they need. The most indispensable tool is Disco, a platform that allows users to organize a music library, search for songs using metadata, and share songs with others in a way that allows them to control who can listen to it. Aiding in finding music are a number of AI-driven music search engines, such as AIMS (AI Music Search). Berklee students and alumni have their own music licensing platform, RAIDAR (Rights and Asset Information in Decentralized, Authoritative Repositories) which allows them to upload music and directly license it for sync using blockchain technology to control and track usage.

The music available through music libraries has become more sophisticated over the past several years, says Nikole Luebbe BM ’15, who has worked as a music supervisor with Tinopolis and as a freelancer before joining Warner Bros.’ video game department last year. While working on the reality TV show Top Chef in 2019, she would sometimes cringe at the music selections available in such libraries. Now music libraries feature more nuanced pieces written by top composers such as Hans Zimmer, who’s written an album specifically for sync. 

New Demand

Reality TV is one genre in which music has become much more sophisticated, says Luebbe, who now teaches a music supervision course through Berklee Online. “When I first started working in reality TV 10 years ago, I remember being almost embarrassed,” she says. But the popularity of shows from The Real Housewives to The Bachelor has brought the genre into the mainstream. “There is no shame around reality TV now—even artists are aware they contain make-or-break moments to expose them to big audiences.”

That’s even more the case for video games, which now feature elaborate immersive worlds in which gamers spend hours. “People spend half their life in these games, and fall in love with the music,” says Luebbe. Rather than rely on prerecorded music to provide the soundtrack to these games, now she often works with orchestras that record original content. Music supervisors also structure licensing deals differently for video games, allowing fans to use the music in videos and remixes.

Social media has added a new dimension to sync as people post snippets of films, TV shows, ads, or other video content to Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and other social platforms. Supervisors usually negotiate separate rights for social media use. Sometimes, however, the limitations are beyond their control, as when Universal prohibited TikTok from using the record label’s catalog.

Other media are also creating new employment opportunities for music supervisors. For example, it’s become increasingly common for podcast producers to hire music supervisors who can help their shows stand out in a crowded market. “It’s really [about] creating a musical personality or sonic branding for the project,” Posner says.

For all the excitement and popularity of the music supervision field, practitioners still struggle to be recognized for the crucial role they play in tying together the visual and the auditory elements in a vast variety of creative projects. “I know few music supervisors who have steady incomes,” says Golubic. “It’s a poorly paid job and a poorly understood job—a lot of studios use their leverage to force supervisors to take low fees.” A recent attempt to unionize the field failed. But the Guild of Music Supervisors has been working to both better educate artists on how to make their music easier to license to emphasize to labels and producers that music supervisors help make everything sound better. “There’s a big push for continued education about the role,” Posner says. “We are really emphasizing that we are an integral part of the creative team.”