License, Library or Original Score?: While radio and video hits keep coming, composers are challenged with selling clients on original scores

Post, March, 2002 by David John Farinella

TIP: "I think keeping the process creative instead of being technical will make the music more creative," reports Brian Yessian. "Let's not break things down to the note and getting so technical. You should let the whole thing breathe a little bit and make it creative."

NIGHTINGALE: ORIGINAL MUSIC CREATES A BRAND

Caron Nightingale, owner of Toronto's Nightingale Music Production (www.nightingalemusic.com). comes from the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" department when it comes to competing against licensed music. In addition to creating original music for commercials, Nightingale represents 12 music and sound effects libraries (including its own), provides music supervision and clearance services and helps clients make decisions about when to use original or stock music. Nightingale does see the benefit of using original music. "First of all, I guess everybody knows that original music will allow for the greatest control or finessing of putting music to picture," she states. "It's great to have when you've got the budget. You have the potential to get exactly what you want -- marrying music to picture."

There's also the risk of not getting the exact piece of music that clients are after, but Nightingale believes original music is vital for station IDs, branding themes and commercials. "If you're looking to do any kind of branding that sticks with people, then you'll find if you do stock music or a network theme or a diaper commercial you might be singing along to the same piece of music being used for a condom commercial. You have to be really careful with that."

As for a recent project, Nightingale points to a spot they worked on for the Aboriginal Network in Canada. It was a tough musical balancing act between the branding company looking for hip music versus the spiritual nature of Native American music. To bridge part of that gap the company brought a composer onboard who is well known in the Aboriginal community. "This has been a tug of war," she says. "In almost any other genre in this world, you could take any style of music, whether it is African or Celtic, and you can have the slow version and the fast version. Well, what we were being told is with the Aboriginals, particularly in Canada, there's no such thing as energetic music, unless they're chanting very loudly, which we couldn't do because that doesn't work with people talking overtop."

The company created five :30 spots with Aboriginals telling their stories as well as a handful of promo spots. The composers came up with two different styles: a fusion style to satisfy the branding company and a slower version to make sure not to alienate the Aboriginals. "We were actually trying to create an atmosphere where the Aboriginal Network was not just a network for Aboriginals, but was something that would encourage everyone else to watch and find it all fascinating," she says.

TIP: After meeting with the client, Nightingale will spend a couple of days researching a variety of music and then send the client a CD with a handful of musical styles. "We'll sit down with them and listen to every piece," Nightingale explains. "By the time we're finished with that listening session we usually have an extremely accurate idea of what they want. We'll do that rather than having a composer sit down for three days and work on one piece."