Have you ever wondered how your very own music could be featured in a TV show or a movie? Sync music licensing is the key to getting your songs heard by a wider audience while earning some serious cash. Bree Noble chats with music producer and sync licensing expert Chris SD who shares insider knowledge on how to land sync placement deals. Chris demystifies the world of music supervisors and reveals why they love indie music more than any other type or genre. He also explains how he can help get your music to your target listeners and shares about his upcoming free panel discussion with today’s top music supervisors.

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Sync Music Secrets Revealed: A Deep Dive With Chris SD

Meet Chris SD: Sync Licensing Expert

I’m excited to be here with my friend Chris SD. I always say “my friend” because I do get to know my guests, but Chris and I have been friends for a long time. We have been in masterminds together and we have been on trips together. It’s been a great experience getting to know him and all the things that he does for musicians. I want you guys to know all about it. I want to have him introduce himself a little bit, let you guys know a little bit about his background, and how he works with musicians, and then we’ll get into some stuff about sync licensing because I’m excited to share some things with you about that.

Thanks so much for having me. This is great. You reminded me when you were talking about hanging out, like masterminds, which you’ve done, and we have gotten to know each other well over the years. I remember years ago when I first had heard of you, and we were first talking, and you were like this matriarch of helping women in music and stuff, and I thought that was so cool. I have a very accomplished sister, and I was always behind everything you were doing.

I thought you were so excellent at being able to communicate and shape the music industry in how to release records and all the things that musicians need to do in a very specific way that was catered to your community. I admire all the work you do, and so it’s always a super pleasure. Coming on here with you. Sync licensing, you want to talk sync.

I do and I have been talking about what you do with music artists for several years now. Maybe let them know how you get started working in sync licensing, working with supervisors?

It all goes back to when I was working in a studio. Before that, I was in a band, and then I got into music production. I was fascinated by the dark art of music production. How does it work? How do they get all these cool sounds? How do you make records sound the way they do? I dove into that, and I had the good fortune of winning some awards as a music producer and so on. I was working with major label artists, and I was also working with indie artists as well. The indie artists that I worked with a lot of them had music that was as good as the majors, but they didn’t have agents, managers, or labels propelling their careers along.

It became this thing of I’m spending so much effort on these indie records, and they are working hard, trying to be something and get to a place with their music, and yet there was nobody pushing the record when it was done. The record would go out, there’d be this party, this local fanfare with their friends and their smaller fan base and family and stuff, and then crickets nothing would happen. It became, honestly, extremely frustrating for me.

Sync Licensing: A Game Changer For Musicians

It was right around then that I started hearing about sync licensing. I had heard of a couple like this early on when indie music was becoming cool to get your song into a show, movie, or ad. There were so many more choices now we weren’t stuck with the old cable TV stuff, where a lot of that was generic, and people were like, “I don’t want my song on that.” Suddenly, we had all these cool shows and all these cool concepts coming out. It would be great. My People, I like watching that show. People who love the show must love my music because I love the music that’s on there too. I make music that’s similar, and it’s a big win-win.

I started hearing of this, and one particular artist got a sync placement, and they were like, “I paid my rent for the year.” It’s like you are kidding me. That is amazing. You get money to get because I didn’t know what it was. It sounded boring to me, sync licensing and licensing industry is a corporate thing. It sounded, honestly, like a distraction from trying to get your music out, like you should be out touring and going after labels.

As I started looking more into it, I realized that it was such an amazing avenue for indie artists because when you get it’s easy and it’s fast. I qualify the “easy” thing. I will talk about that in a second. If you know the right person, and you can get your song to them, and they pick it it happens quickly. The process is quite easy, and you get this amazing exposure. You get thousands, sometimes millions of viewers watching something depending on what you get into, and they are all there Shazaming your song.

 

Not all of them even if a fraction of them do it you still have a huge number of people all trying to find you online. Your Spotify spins go way up. I was talking to a member of Sync Songwriter, and they got a song into a movie called Pain Hustlers. They got written up in Billboard magazine. They had festivals calling them. They had labels interested. Their fan base went way up. The Spotify spins went off the charts because that song got spun a lot. Then the algorithm in Spotify says, “Look at this. Let’s push out more of this artist’s songs for people to discover.” It was one placement that did that for them.

I have seen people land in the charts from placements, and then the other benefit is they often get paid thousands of dollars to license the song. Every time the song is aired, put on streaming, or whatever, they get these backend royalties through the PRO. If you own the publishing of your song, there are essentially performance royalties coming your way all year long. It is a fantastic avenue.

The problem was when I was getting into it and discovering this. I like most musicians, stumbled across what seemed like an easy path, and those were sync agents and music libraries. I was like, “This is doubly easy. All we have to do is put the music into a library or get signed with a sync agent, and then they are going to do all this work for you.” They took a cut back then, it was probably around 25% or something of the sync fee, which is the money you get upfront when you license your music and they didn’t take any of your publishing, so you got all the backend royalties.

It looked good, but it didn’t take very long to discover that those entities, music libraries, and sync agents, are great for the libraries and sync agents. They always have something in there because they have thousands to millions of tracks in their rosters. They can usually get a sync placement because they’ve got lots of stuff. If a music supervisor comes to them, they are going to have something right for the music supervisor. Good for them. That works well. It works great for the music supervisor because a supervisor comes there and can usually find something. Sony, for example, has five million tracks in their library. They can usually find something in there that’s going to work without a lot of effort looking through tracks.

The problem is it’s terrible for songwriters. The songwriter says, “This is great. I got to put my music up there.” You’re like a needle in a haystack. You’re in a little lifeboat floating in the ocean without a satellite phone, hoping a ship is going to come along within eyesight, see you, and pick you up. It’s like playing the lottery.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can test this. Ask every musician who’s got music in a library or who’s been signed to a sync agent, and ask them how many consistent placements they are getting. I already know the answer. You might find someone who’s like, “I got 1 or 2. They were one-offs. 1 happened 5 years ago, then I got a small one 2 years ago.” You might have those people, and the rest will have none. By far, the majority will have none.

That was what I was confronted with. I was like, “How am I going to help the indie artists I work with? These records that I want to do well. How am I going to help them by licensing it to TV and film, like some of the successes I have already seen if they’ve got to go into these libraries and sync agencies? It’s like playing the lottery. This is not a good path.”

Then it wasn’t very long after that when I realized, “Wait, if the middlemen, the libraries, and sync agents have relationships with the people in the industry who place the music, who are called music supervisors, then why can’t I do that? Why can’t I get relationships with music supervisors?” There’s no reason I can’t do that. I’ve got some music, not much of it, more stuff I’m working on but it’s pretty cool. I’m doing a good job on the records, and it sounds good. Why can’t they use that?

That’s when it started. I started reaching out to music supervisors, going to everything I was invited to parties, events, conferences, whatever. Year after year, I started seeing them more, and they saw my face a little bit more and a little bit more. Eventually, I became a trusted source for music supervisors and have been building that network over time. It takes a very long time to do that, but to become one of the go-to trusted sources for independent music in the sync industry with top music supervisors, there’s a lot of work. I tend to work with the top ones.

Music Supervisors: Gatekeepers of Music

If someone’s reading and they’re like, “What’s a music supervisor?” They are hired by the movie and TV studios to handle the music part. The directors and producers are way too busy. They are working on the storyline, visuals, casting, and everything else. They don’t have time to look for music to go in all the scenes, so they hire a person called a music supervisor to do that. Those are the gatekeepers, the people who work directly with the directors and producers to find the music for shows, movies, and ads.

Sometimes the director or the writer of the screenplay envisions a specific song for a scene, like something similar to a well-known song. “I’m envisioning something like Fix You by Coldplay in the scene.” They can’t afford to get Fix You by Coldplay. The supervisor’s job is to look for something similar that has the same mood. Other times, the supervisors are given carte blanche to figure out what they think will fit the scene.

People ask, “Why do they use independent music in TV and film? They use so much of it. Why is that?” The simple answer is that they can afford it. They would rather pay you $10,000 for a good placement than $250,000, which is what they paid the Beatles’ estate or whoever owns the publishing for the Beatles to put Tomorrow Never Knows into Mad Men in 2012. They paid $250,000 for one spot.

Most shows, almost all of them, have a yearly budget. If they blow a huge chunk of their budget on one song, it’s because it was important to them, and that’s what they decided to do. For shows like Grey’s Anatomy, that’s a huge show. Can you believe it’s still running? It’s still got this viewership. The music that gets on there gets discovered all the time. They use well-put-together indie music. I was talking to one of our members who got his third sync placement on Grey’s Anatomy. That stuff is so great for indie artists. The pay is good, and the exposure is incredible.

Shows like that become known for being places to discover new music. I remember Dawson’s Creek being one of those shows with great music, or One Tree Hill. You can discover some cool indie music on these shows. I have a question I’ve always wanted to ask. Since we’re indie artists, we don’t command $250,000. What’s to prevent them from saying, “Here’s $100 for your song?” Do they have lower limits that they have to pay for syncing?

Depending on what it is. If you get into reality TV, you are going to get lower amounts, you are going to get $500 for sync placements because it’s a low budget. They are trying to make this thing take off. They are spending the least amount of money possible, and so that’s what they are offering. When you get into network TV shows and you get into the higher levels of things, when the budget’s given to a supervisor, the supervisor is breaking the budget down according to what they think the music needs are ahead of time. They are not going to the marketplace and negotiating. If a supervisor says, “We want to replace your song, this is how much I can pay you.” That’s almost always what they can pay you.

 

You can sometimes go higher, you can negotiate, you can say, “It’s a little low. I thought I could get more. Can you go back and see if there’s any more there?” Sometimes they will if they want it. The key is knowing that they take the budget ahead of time and break it down already. They are not walking in willy-nilly like, “Let’s see what the lowest price we can get from this person.” They have already set their budget. They already said, “We are going to pay $5,000 for this spot. We are going to pay $2,500 for this spot. We are going to pay $30,000 for this spot,” which I got from one of our members for $30,000 for one sync placement. That is how that works, and there are standards there.

This can shift over time for sure. They might be dropping over the years, who knows? If people wonder, “What do you make?” The gamut runs from $500 up to 6 figures. You were talking about the Beatles song, and stuff like that. You could probably pay $1 million for a Super Bowl ad, maybe even for a Michael Jackson song or something. Who knows?

For indie artists, we have gone all over the place. Like I said, reality TV is $500, maybe $1,000. For bigger TV shows, you are looking at $2,500, or $3,000. Bigger TV shows than that, more established ones, $4,000, $5,000, and $6,000, $7,000. Somebody got $10,000. Probably shouldn’t mention the show because it’s still on. We got $10,000 for a well-known show. Then you get the $20,000 and $30,000, which Sync Songwriter members have gotten as well, and then it goes up from there. You get into ads, which pay huge amounts of money sometimes. The problem with them is it’s difficult to get into. That’s the thing.

That’s on the front end, the placement fee. Do they get things for reruns or long-term streaming on the back end with the PRO, or is that like who’s on the contract?

That’s what I was talking about earlier, is that you get the sync fee up front and then that’s like a lump of cash that’s saying, “Here’s the fee we are going to pay.” You say, “$5,000 for this.” You get that in your bank account right away. As the show airs multiple times, it’s syndicated, it’s streamed all the time for years sometimes. You get these backend royalties coming through your PRO all the time. It’s a fabulous way to make money as a musician.

The money is amazing for indie artists, but I always feel like the exposure is even better because you set off to become a musician, you want your music to see the light of day. You want to get it out there. You don’t want to like almost all indie songwriters out there, because everyone and their dog has a record out. You go to SoundCloud and you can see that.

Exposure is always good when you are setting off to become a musician. You want your music to see the light of day. Share on X

You want to get your music out there and share that with as many people as you can. People have different motivations for that and we don’t need to get into that. Some of it’s money, some of it’s artistic, some of it’s like self-affirmation, some of it’s like trying to do the right thing because they write a song about a cause or something. There are all these different motivations of musicians, but musicians all understand that music is a language and it’s meant to be shared. You want to see your music get out there and something to happen with it.

Unfortunately, for most singer-songwriters, that’s never going to happen in their lifetime. It’s going to be their friends, their family. I’m sure there are so many people who have toiled over a recording and put it out hoping for good things and doing it as much as they can on social media. All your friends are like, “This is great,” for a week. Honestly, almost all of them fade away.

My mission has been to try to make that dream come true. In the best way, I know how that I think the best way to do it is by getting your song into TV and film. You are riding on the coattails of the movie studios who are spending enormous amounts of money on promotion and putting these shows out, and you put your song in there. The trick is getting it in there because you can’t reach music supervisors. You can’t just email or call them. There’s no way because they are inundated with emails and calls and everything. That’s why you can’t reach out and do it. You have to, unfortunately, it’s a lot about who you know.

No, it’s true. I want to affirm all of you musicians that are reading, I know that you are going to keep making music, most of you, whether you make a dollar or not because it’s in your blood. You can’t share what is in you, in your soul, that you want to let out and create and share with other people. What Chris said is true. Most of you, you’d love to make money, and what I always say, even if you are a hobby artist, is that making money allows you to make more music. We want to try to make money, but we also want to try to get your songs heard. I saw an article that said that there are more songs that come out in a day on streaming now than there were that came out in the entire year of 1989.

Part of that is because the gates have been pulled down. Before you had to have a record or be on a record label to get released and all that stuff, and that’s a great thing about the gates being pulled down. More great music can get out there for people to hear and enjoy, but it also means there’s a lot more competition. I love what you said about this being a way that you can get in front of new people, and I have like a personal story about this that happened. My youngest daughter started driving. We have been driving to the gym three times a week together so we can keep each other accountable and all that, and so she gets to choose the music because it’s her car.

She has been into this show Arcane. I don’t know if you are familiar with that show. It was a video game and now it’s a show. She’s been playing the album from Arcane and the main song from it is Imagine Dragons, which I know, but then there’s all these other songs. I have never heard of any of them, and they are everything from hard punk to moody singer-songwriters and then a gospely one. Every time I’m like, “This is an interesting song. Who is this?” She looks at the thing on the screen and says, “I have never heard of this person.” Every single time. I have never heard of this person and I work with indie artists and I have never heard of these people.

I’m getting this every single day listening to this soundtrack and I’m like, “I like this. I’m going to add some of these songs to my playlist. How would I have ever discovered these people?” Never unless they were on this soundtrack for Arcane. My daughter, she’s sixteen, she’s Gen Z and that’s how they are discovering a lot of stuff now. They will see a show they like, they hear the music, they look it up on Spotify and they start listening to it, and over and over she’s listening to it.

That phrase that I coined is that music supervisors have essentially become the new A&R because they are breaking music, they are breaking artists all the time, whether they are trying to do it or not. Now here’s something cool. I will tell you two things that are super cool. One is that music supervisors, you might be thinking, well they, then they can go to libraries and they can go to sync agents and get all their music.

The thing about music supervisors is two things. One is they want to discover new stuff that’s never been discovered. They do not want something that’s in a library that other supervisors are going to find. They want to be the cool kid, they want to do the crate digging, they want to find the stuff that, “Where’d you find that artist? This is amazing. I never heard of them.” They want to have that credit.

Music supervisors want to discover new stuff that has never been discovered. They want those that other supervisors will not find. Share on X

The second thing to know is that they are down-to-earth cool people. At least at the top, the ones I deal with. They are either musicians themselves or in bands or they have friends who were in bands or at the very least they are music lovers. They love music and they are moved by it, and they chose this profession because they get to be around music all the time. They are super cool down-to-earth people. They are not unlike musicians at all. They would much rather, and I hear this from all of them all the time, they’d much rather support an artist or an indie songwriter or someone who’s got a great song than what they call the faceless libraries. That is a huge part of that. That’s key.

Getting Your Music In TV & Film

The other thing that I wanted to mention, which should be such a relief to you, is that anybody can get a sync placement again for two reasons. One is that almost anything out there, like anything like Tibetan throat singing, meditation music, show tunes, let alone the hip hop, pop, country, and rock, The big four, there’s a home for everything because there’s so much. The sync industry is worth $100 billion. It’s going to be worth it, they are saying in 2030, $600 billion. That’s how fast things are still exploding. All these productions crave this music. There’s a home for every kind of music.

You could write anything you want. Now you might be thinking you’ve got to write for sync, “I got to write the stuff that sounds good in TV and film.” Not at all. There are some people who do that. They do it very well. The vast majority of the indie music that gets on there. All those songs probably that were on that record you were talking about are artists, they are people who wrote songs from their heart and they made their music for their fans or them or their because or whatever motivates them to make the music their muse. They created that music, and supervisors are looking for authenticity. That’s their big thing. They don’t want to hear production music all the time. They want to hear authentic music.

It comes down to anybody, any age, doesn’t matter where you live. We got five tracks into this Cannes Film Festival-winning movie, Anora, one of the musicians, there are two members who got that, one of them lives in a tiny little town outside of Ottawa, Canada and he plays jazz and he’s this guy out in this little town who puts out these jazz records and he is in a major movie that’s got Golden Globe buzz and that has Oscar buzz. We’ll see if they get nominated. It’s amazing. You can be any age, any style of music, anything, and you can rock it in sync licensing.

It is amazing, and I know that I attract an older demographic, especially women. They feel like, “I cannot. How can I be big? I’m over 50 or whatever, and I’m competing with these people who are 27 or even younger.” I think it’s so encouraging to know that you don’t have to look a certain way to get your music into a major thing and make a good deal of money and fans off of it.

The number of women who get sync placements at Sync Songwriter is incredible. There are at least as many women getting sync placements as the men there, and not only that, we have tons of them from women who are over 40, 50, and 60. I don’t know what the record is, but we have people who are over 70 who’ve joined and gotten sync placements.

It comes down to the song. That’s the key. It’s the song. It doesn’t matter where you live, what you look like, where you come from, how much money you’ve got, whether you’re signed, or if you’ve gotten sync placements before. None of that matters. It comes down to if you get comments like, “I could hear your music in a show, movie, or ad,” then you’re probably ready to go. You have to know how to connect with the right people in TV and film. That’s the actual challenge. You’ve got to be a good songwriter. If you’ve got the songs, the only next thing you need to do is be able to connect with the right people and know how to present your music to them. That’s it.

When you are good at songwriting and you have good songs, the next thing you need to do is connect with the right people and present your work to them. Share on X

Meet The Music Supervisors: Free Panel

I love how you humanize the supervisors because I feel a kinship to them. I’ve been a music curator for a long time now, since 2007. It’s not that we are trying to be like this Wizard of Oz or whatever, behind the curtain and all that stuff. We want to help musicians, we love music, like you said. We want to be the ones who discover the cool new sound, but we get so much stuff thrown our way.

There are so many people trying to access us and get their music in front of us that we do have to put up these gates. What worked is that we work with artists to develop those relationships, help them connect with the supervisors on a personal level, and teach them how to approach them correctly. I love that you do that. You also have this panel where the supervisors come and talk about what they’re looking for and how they choose their music and all that stuff. Do you want to talk a little bit about that panel that’s coming up very soon?

Every year, I put on the Sync Songwriter Music Supervisor Panel. These are the music supervisors who are the gatekeepers of this industry. They work directly with the directors and producers of shows, movies, and ads. I invited five supervisor friends of mine. They all work on big shows with incredible credits. We sit around for an hour, and they talk all about why they use indie music, what indie music they’re looking for, how they find their music, and why it’s important. They talk to the people who show up. They’re discussing the idea that you can do this too. You don’t have to be on a major label or with a publisher or anything. They use music like yours all the time.

 

A lot of people know that, but they feel like it’s daunting or there’s this big barrier. What you were saying, like the supervisors being humanized. The other cool thing about going to the panel, which is completely free and virtual, is that you usually have to pay to get in and fly to LA to go to these kinds of things. I do it online. You show up in your pajamas, and it doesn’t cost anything.

You get to see specific music supervisors for shows that you think, “My music would sound great in that movie or show that they tend to work on.” You get an idea of who these people are. It is very popular. We have over 10,000 musicians who sign up to attend this thing every year. I believe it’s the biggest sync event online, due to that number. It happens every January. The date for that is Sunday, January 12th, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. Be there. It’s completely free. I always encourage people to go to it because once you go to it, you hear it from the supervisor.

There’s one thing for me to tell you. Especially if you’re reading right now and you don’t know who I am, there’s no reason to take my word for it. I get it. We all deal with people online that we don’t know who come at us with emails and all this other stuff. If you don’t know who I am and want to know more about it, come and see the actual people I’m talking about. That’s the key. I want to offer this to indie songwriters so they can realize the possibilities for them and how this can happen for them.

I send thousands of people a year to this, so I want to encourage all of you to sign up. We have our own, Profitable Musician Sync. Be sure to sign up for that so you can get into the panel and sign up early. I don’t know if you guys have a cap on how many seats are available. It must be crazy to host that many people at once.

We don’t have a cap, but we’re always seeing how many people are coming in, and we can upgrade live. We have to upgrade the capacity sometimes. It’s like, “We better get another bump in capacity.” I can’t work with everybody myself. Throughout the year, I work with songwriters and connect them directly to supervisors. That’s my job. I’m like a doorman. I’m like, “Here are my friends, the supervisors. You’ve got great music you guys meet and see what happens.” That’s what I do. The panel itself is a cool event that I invite as many people out to as possible so they can see how the industry works behind the scenes, why supervisors use indie music, and why they can use their music in their productions. That can be a massive game changer for any songwriter’s music career.

Go see the opportunity, even if you’re thinking to yourself, “I could never do this.” You can see exactly what they’re looking for, and you might even realize, “Maybe my music could fit.” If you’re unsure, go and learn. It’s always good to learn about the industry and how things work. Maybe you’re not ready now, but in a year, you might realize, “I do have music that fits this.” Chris, thank you so much. It’s always great to catch up with you. We try to catch up throughout the year, but we always catch up once a year around this panel. It’s so good we have this opportunity to catch up every time.

Thanks so much for having me here. It’s always a pleasure, and we’ll be talking in the new year.

 

Important Links

• Chris SD on LinkedIn
• Sync Songwriter
• Profitable Musician Sync

 

About Chris SD

I’m Chris SD and I’ve been helping artists, composers, producers and songwriters get their music synced for over 15 years.

I’m the creator of The Art Of The Song Pitch (artofthesongpitch.com)… a proven step-by-step process that has helped songwriters get their music into everything from Hollywood movies, to blockbuster trailers, and countless television shows.