These companies will be aggressively pitching the music they have acquired, heavily leaning towards the 1960s to the 1980s, to get the biggest and swiftest return on their investment. Artists such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and various members of Fleetwood Mac have sold the rights to their songs to these companies for a cash lump sum in recent years, allowing the companies to accrue future revenue from them – and syncs are a major source of that revenue. This trend is also partly reflected in the song catalogues being bought up by companies such as Hipgnosis, BMG, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, WMG and Primary Wave. “I know it’s going to be so expensive to clear.” “A lot of the scripts I get now are looking for music from the 1980s, reflecting the age of the directors,” says Farr, noting that when music is in vogue, the sync fees rise accordingly. Particular musical eras are currently hot in TV shows, and Stranger Things, set in the 1980s, is both cause and symptom. “If you look on TikTok, the #runningupthathill hashtag has got almost a billion views and there have been over two million creations using the sound.” “TV and film syncs are still pushing culture, but now people have got the ability to take that culture and go elsewhere with it,” explains Tom Gallacher, senior director of digital and marketing at Rhino UK, part of WMG. This is something record companies cannot anticipate or manipulate. The new wildcard is TikTok: clips from shows can be decontextualised and chopped up into a variety of memes that may go viral, providing a powerful accelerant. Record company marketing activity can be planned and coordinated around a major sync, as streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music are lobbied to get behind a track. “That’s unprecedented,” says Miles, “and that’s why we’re having this incredible effect with music when it’s used well.” They have been used for decades – remember John Cusack holding up a boombox playing Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes in Say Anything? – but the difference today is that due to streaming, TV shows are immediately global instead of regional. Syncs’ power is twofold: they generate a fee for the music use and they also provide a promotional springboard for music that might have otherwise been overlooked. “Even if the show has not been picked up by Netflix yet, the rights holders are still quoting with that in mind.” “The likes of Amazon and Netflix made a lot of money during the pandemic and I feel like the dynamic has changed a little bit, with the rights holders going, ‘Right, you can afford to pay a proper fee for this,’” she says. She says that if a streaming platform is involved, music publishers and record labels will ask for exponentially greater fees to use songs in their catalogues. They are today’s priority platforms for sync teams and music supervisors for two reasons: enormous reach, and enormous budgets.Ĭonnie Farr is founder of music supervision company ThinkSync and has worked on films and shows such as Rocks, After Love, Creation Stories and The Essex Serpent. The proliferation of streaming platforms such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video is unlocking enormous new opportunities for music sync, especially for catalogue titles such as Running Up That Hill. But, he says, “we did know it was going to be used a lot and you could tell this was going to be a big moment.” “It’s hard to predict how powerful a sync will be,” says Tim Miles, SVP of sync for UK and Europe at Warner Music Group, who distribute Bush’s music (she owns her own recorded and publishing rights). Something similar is happening to Metallica’s Master of Puppets from 1986: since being used in Stranger Things’ finale earlier this month, it is currently climbing the Top 40 in the UK. Palmer cautions that Running Up That Hill is “a bit of a unicorn – most of my colleagues would admit that’s a once-in-a-decade thing,” but Bush is not a total outlier.
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