Music Supervisors On Finding Indie Music For Movies & TV Shows [Part 3]
Future posts will focus on advertising and video games as well as services designed to help you reach music supervisors.
Rollo & Grady are an "online music publication and music supervision, licensing, and production company." You can find out more about submitting music to them on their Music Supervision page.
Music Supervisors on How They Find Indie Music
Fusion Music Supervision's Chris Mollere has supervised such tv shows as The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars and such movies as The Box and I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell.
R&G: What's the best way for an independent or unsigned artist to get on your radar?
"Hit me up, definitely. They can go through my website
and just hit submissions. I check those all out. I don't necessarily
email everybody back...Digital links have kind of overwhelmed me a
little bit, so make sure to put in a link that doesn't expire. Sometimes
it'll take me a month to get back and download from a link I've been
sent...if I try to download from a link that expired after fourteen days
and I've only gotten a chance to click through to it after three weeks,
it's unlikely that I would write to the sender and request that they
resend the link."
R&G: Do you use Dropbox, SoundCloud, YousendIt, or Box.net?
"Yousendit and Dropbox are fine. I like
SoundCloud a lot, because of how you can see the Wavform. I've been
getting into thumb drives lately, which remind me, 'Oh, I need to check
out this music.'..."
"CDs are back. It's funny. As much as all
of us tried to go totally digital, it's kind of impossible, because
there's so much coming in; everybody's doing digital, and I don't know
how to deal with all those links. Los Angeles traffic, as you know, is
kind of good for CDs. It's good to just grab some CDs and throw them in
my car and roll; I can listen while I drive."
"One thing all artists should do is to
include metadata in their MP3 files, so that when I press Apple-I to
check it out, I can see your phone number or email address. Gracenote
your CDs, it makes it a lot easier to track artists down, especially
because the track names don't always transfer. Sometimes you put a CD in
and the tracks come up as 'Track 4', 'Track 1', 'Track 7', or whatever.
How am I going to know where the hell that came from? That could lose a
placement. It could be a perfect song, but I'm like, 'Shit, I don't
know what this is.'"
[Note: I had a similar experience with an artist I was going to feature in a Hypebot post whose digital album had no identifying info. That got scratched when I couldn't find her publicist's email. Smaller stakes, same game.]
Firestarter Music's Andrea von Foerster, who was also quoted in Part 1 of this series, has supervised music for such tv series as Don't Trust the B----- in Apartment 23 and Run's House as well as the the movie 500 Days of Summer among other accomplishment [Updated].
I included these additional comments because they reveal other channels for contacting music supervisors as well as some important email guidelines.
R&G: What's the best way for an independent or unsigned artist to get on your radar?
"I go to a lot of music conferences and
festivals...Every time I get invited to an event, I go because I want to
meet people who pitch music on the label side, development side, agency
side, management side, the artists themselves...When I'm at one of
these events, already I'm in a good mood because I'm away even though
I'm still trying to get my work done, which I am. I'm seeing new music
and meeting new people. I love new people. I love new music. I love new
places."
"So I'm already in a good mood and if you
meet me at an event, you've got me in the best possible light. This is
better than listening to you for the first time on my iTunes for a
couple seconds maybe in the 14th hour of my day, when I'm kind of
grumpy. It's really great when you can play a conference or a festival
or something in your area that you've been invited to."
R&G: What's the best way for
an artist to get your attention when they are emailing you regarding
placing their music in one of your projects?
"I don't need an entire press kit. I
don't need a bunch of pictures. What if I think you look kind of silly
but I love your music? I really just want to know who has the
publishing, who has the master, where are you from, and are there any
samples...I don't need to know your story. If I want to know your story,
I'll ask later once I like you."
"I get a thousand emails a day, if not
more...It takes a lot to get my attention, to break the monotony of all
the emails I get in a day. If it's just short and concise, maybe be
funny somewhere in there, that's awesome, and I'll remember that, but I
really sort of compartmentalize where people are from, so if I have an
idea of where you are from, that helps me remember you."
R&G: If you receive a 1000
emails per day, I assume you don't like mp3 attachments clogging up your
inbox. What's the best way to submit music to you?
"Never never never never never send an
mp3 to somebody's inbox without asking them first. We all get a lot of
emails and that many people sending you mp3s will just clog up your
inbox. I like things that don't expire: ftp sites, box.net, Dropbox,
Yousendit if you have an account and the link won't expire."
Rollo & Grady also interviewed heavyweights Scott Vener (Entourage) and Michelle Kuznetsky (Sons of Anarchy, Kill Bill: Vol. 1) though without much info on indie music discovery.
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