Your thoughts on music libraries and commercials?

[Todd Terry]

Hi Jack…

I’m late to the party, but I’ll chime in.

We do some corporate, but the vast bulk of what we produce is :30 broadcast commercials, so I’m always looking for those tracks.

I’d say, as others have mentioned here, that ease of use should be what you really strive for with your library. We already own a couple of different libraries (a couple of hundred discs, I guess) but don’t primarily use them. It’s just too darn hard to wade through them, frankly.

We usually buy music on-line, via a half-dozen or so different vendors that we regularly go to. We’ve ended up gravitating to those that have the best search features to lead us in the right direction and avoid wasting time. Some, yes, work better than others. The ones that work better get most of our business, probably.

Some of the tracks we use are total buy-out… others are buy-out for a specific project… and others are more closely rights-managed. It seems the better a track is, the more paperwork that’s involved… ha.

Various available length cuts are of course a bonus. When doing a commercial, what I hate is finding a great 3:40 track, but their :30 version is just the first :30 that fades out at :29.9. That usually leads to a lot of sound editing and patching to try to cobble together a true-sounding :30 with a cold ending.

And obviously the bigger and better and more variety your library has, the better. There’s nothing worse than turning on the boob tube and hearing “your” track on someone else’s spot. We did a campaign last year for a bottled water company. We searched and searched and finally found the perfect track, actually from a fairly obscure source. Within a couple of days that same track was all over the air as the main theme for tons of NBC bumper promos for their new fall season. Grrrrrr.

Good luck with your venture…

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com