Searching for sounds and music: internet, hard drives and personal searches make finding the right track easier for producers

Post, March, 2004 by Matthew Armstrong

the business of music libraries has exploded in the past few years, allowing established libraries to expand the breadth of their offerings, luring production music companies into the library business and leading new library companies to form every year.

The reasons for this success vary. First is simply the rise in the number of clients, with cable stations producing more original programming. Second, is the type of content being created. Most notably the rise of reality TV shows on network and cable TV--which feature music virtually from beginning to end--has further increased the demand.

Along with the sheer increase of production there has been steadily shrinking budgets, which have made many producers turn to music libraries for the first time.

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"Certainly there's the economics of it," notes Joel Goodman co-founder/composer of LA's MusicBox (www.musicboxmx.com), an original music production company that has been offering a music library catalog for the past few years. "Budgets have been moving downward, and at the same time there's been a voracious appetite from cable and network TV. People go to libraries because of budgets and time. They simply don't have the time to get a custom score. A few years ago, there were a lot of opportunities coming at us that we couldn't grasp because of time and money. Having a library allows us to do that."

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"We've had doors open for us in the last few years that would not have opened unless the economy was doing as poorly as it has been," says Catherine Bogin of JRT Music (www.jrtmusic.com) in NYC. "Bigger production houses have started looking at music libraries, and advertising agencies that wouldn't have spoken to us three years ago are now coming to us."

With these various factors creating a perfect storm in which music libraries have been able to thrive economically, veterans in the library business note that what is most enjoyable about this time is that it allows them to produce more innovative and diverse music.

"I have a lot of friends in the music industry that say I have the greatest job in the world," relates Doug Wood, president of Omnimusic (www.omnimusic.com) in Port Washington, NY, which has been in the library business since 1976. "There's no clients breathing down you're neck, you do whatever you want and people pay you for it."

ON THE RIGHT TRACK

As demand for library music has risen sharply in the past few years, not coincidentally, the amount of suppliers has also grown. Thus, the struggle for libraries today is to differentiate their company from the hundreds of other libraries available. "There's a lot of great music out there and what separates one company from another these days is the amount of time you can devote to your clients and the amount of personal service they can get," explains Wood.

The Internet has had a tremendous impact on the accessibility of music libraries, allowing users to search and audition tracks, Megatrax (www.megatrax.com) in North Hollywood allows users to search music on its Web site and is also part of the multi-library search Play site at www.playmegatrax.com, which was pioneered by UK-based music library company KPM.

While many music library companies rely on the third-party software MusicSource as the platform for Internet searches, Groove Addicts designed a proprietary search engine platform.

"I had an aversion to licensing a third-party software that had its limitations and was not going to be able to be expanded as new formats emerged," explains Cindy Rossman, VP/GM of the music licensing division of LA's Groove Addicts (www.grooveaddicts). "There [are] new formats every day and every different market has its own favorite format standard. For us, developing our own system was looking ahead to either hardware and/or Internet delivery. So if something needs to be changed or upgraded, we can do that.

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"One thing our clients love is they can go to our site, earmark tracks, create a project file and then e-mail that link to other members of their team," continues Rossman. "Then, six months down the road when they're on another project, they may remember a piece that they earmarked but didn't use; they can go back to the project manager file on our site and the tracks they auditioned are there."

As the Internet allows anyone to access, search and audition literally millions of tracks, searching and downloading is still tedious. So while most libraries already have or are rapidly getting their libraries online, they are also looking to provide their libraries on a hard drive for immediate auditions. As hard drive delivery may very well be the standard in the near future, Wood warns that music libraries still have a lot of work to do to make these systems efficient.

"Supplying music as files will be the biggest task facing the music library industry and the challenge will be how do you make it easy for the client to find what they need quickly," says Wood. "That's the challenge some of the larger companies that have 5,000 CDs are finding now. How do you help your client find their way through that? If the poor client types in 'Rock' with 'Electric Guitar,' they're going to get 1,200 tracks. So developing systems that are intuitive, based on how clients look for music and how they hear music is going to be the key--allowing them to find the track they need in a couple of mouse clicks."