As a part of our L3 Audio Project module, we receive monthly guest lectures from industry professionals. This month we were visited by Lol Hammond, A music supervisor who works for Vertigo Films. He has worked on many well-known films, some of which include: ‘Monsters’, ‘Bronson’ and ‘Dirty Sanchez: The movie’. He ran through many things including: what a music supervisor is, how he got into music supervising, how to source different tracks and part of the process behind clearing a track.

He explained about the role of the music supervisor and how they are reasonable for sourcing music for (in his case) a film. They work closely with the directors, editors, music composers and sound designers, to ensure the right sounding tracks cleared for the right scenes in the film. He went on to explain how he got into becoming a music supervisor and how this happened by accident. Lol started out by running club nights in Brixton, and was approached by someone who wanted to use his track in a film. He was then asked to become a music supervisor.

To use a music track for as film, the film needs the rights and licence to have that played on the film. The track needs to be cleared before and can be published on the film. Therefore to clear the track, the music supervisor needs to find out how owns the record rights and who owns the publishing rights to that track. Then they need to negotiate a deal/price with the artist/record label/publisher/music composer (depending on the budget). Lol explained that working with the artist directly usually ends up with a better deal as most artists would love for their music to be on a film. When negotiating the music supervisor needs to make sure they are licencing the music forever and not just for a short time frame. They also need to make sure they have worldwide rights and not just a small specific region. He then goes on to explain the average price for clearing a track, which is around £1500-£2000 on average per track each side. (Each side being the record label and publisher adding up to an average of £3000-4000.) When a track is played on the introduction or end credits, the price to clear a track is usually double that. It is usually a lot cheaper if working directly with a composer.

Lol explained a part of the process. He starts by going on set to get a feel of the film. Then once the assembly has finished (cutting down of the film) he will then sit down and watch the film without music to get a feel of the film (sometimes with the director) He will then make creative decisions to what kinds of music he wants and gives 3 or 4 different choices of music that work with the scene to the director. The film will then be temped (put temporary music in the scenes to give the tone of the film) and this will be replaced with the cleared tracks once the rights have be cleared. Music can also be used as a marketing tool to promote the film. Lol explains how sometimes they use a big artist to do possibly the end credits, which can boost the sales of the film.

Lol described how important contacts are to clear the rights to a track. He explains that universal probably own around 50% of the record/publishing rights of the tracks he is trying to clear. Sony and Warner make the majority of the rest of that percentage. Therefore by having contacts in each of these companies, by emailing all three of these contacts, there’s a pretty high chance of finding who owns the rights to that track. If one of these companies don’t own the rights that he will then contact PRS as 99.9% of composers and artists are signed up with them so it would be pretty easy to find them.

I found this lecturer very interesting and informative. It taught me a lot about the Music supervisor role and what it entails. Although it is not the route I want to go down, it has been interesting to find out information about this role. Especially how I could potentially end up having to work with a music supervisor or even have to source tracks for a film.

With my current Audio Project, the composer has already been decided. My role in this project is making sure that the overall ending product sounds good. Therefore I may have to use some ‘Music supervisory’ skills in order to negotiate with the director and composer to make sure the music sounds right with the scenes. Therefore this lecture has been helpful in having an understanding of how to do this.