Advice from a Music Supervisor

19Oct/080

Advice from a Music Supervisor

I was talking with a former music supervisor at a party last night. He had some rather incredible advice for indies and low-budget filmmakers: use whatever music you want and don't ask permission. Wait for the cease and desist letter.

This really made my head spin. I know some festivals have a don't ask / don't tell attitude about music rights, but what about distributors? If the movie's great, sure sometimes they'll pick up the tab on getting rights for things, but I've also heard not having the music rights can be a deal breaker. (After all, we could be talking about $20,000 per cue or more that the distributor has to pony up in addition to buying your film from you, paying to make prints etc. Of course, if you have a real budget, hiring a music supervisor is going to get you great music for much cheaper anyway.)

You can get festival licenses for $1,000 a cue, he said. But at that point you'd be better off doing a 'step deal' starting at $2,000 a cue and then you pay so much every million dollars the movie makes. Distributors don't like this kind of deal, because it requires extra accounting, but it's better than them buying the cues themselves.

I asked him why there isn't a system whereby indies could buy rights to songs, especially ones that aren't popular, for a reasonable fee. The answer is is that for publishing and record companies, it's the same amount of paper work whether they are getting paid $50,000 or $5,000. This seems crazy to me that they can't set up a system that takes micropayments (if you can call $5,000 a micropayment). From my indie vantage, this is essentially free money (not for the artists, who rarely own their masters or their publishing) that the music rights holders are leaving on the table -- because the alternative for the indie filmmaker is to d.i.y. the music or hire a composer. This happened with Rain in the Mountains. There was a rather obscure song that the filmmakers were willing to pay a good percentage of the film's entire budget to get. But that number was too low for the publishing company to bother.

What about popular songs? What's a good deal for an indie? He said recently one music supervisor, because of a relationship with a manager (see what you pay a music supervisor for), got a Radiohead cue for $8,000 master and $8,000 publishing or $16,000 total. This, he said, is an unheard of deal. With that, using a strategy they call 'most favored nations', this music supervisor was able to go My Morning Jacket, Bright Eyes and other bands and say, hey, Radiohead is only asking $16k. So all the cues are cheaper.

I also learned, from talking to him, that music supervisors usually negotiate a few points on the soundtrack sales, which can be very lucrative if the soundtrack takes off. If you can convince your music supervisor that the movie is going to be in front of enough people to generate sales, that can be a big motivator.