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She topped Spotify Viral and Shazam in the UK on a debut single, soundtracked an Apple TV+ trailer, and locked the summer between Mighty Hoopla and Boardmasters. The fans called her an overnight. She was an eight-year build that hit on cue. The trailer landed on a Wednesday in March. Ninety seconds of David E. Kelley dramedy. Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer. Apple money, A24 sheen. A song doing the lift underneath. The song was Fabulous. The artist was MEEK. Si

A 26-year-old caregiver in Tacoma posted an a-cappella jingle to TikTok. Less than a month later it was on a national broadcast. The interesting question is what the deal underneath it actually looked like, because most of it is still missing.

On Daniel Wall's Behind The Wall podcast, Diplo said it out loud: "I don't even need a voice anymore. I can get the best voice from AI. I don't need anybody to sing the song anymore." On X, he told creatives to "adapt or just like give up and become an Uber driver." It's sad more than anything. Sad to watch someone with a platform that big sell out the entire act of music-making in a single press cycle. I make music every day. I'm staying. Humans make art because we have to.

Big Fish Theory Was Paid For By A Song Nobody Played A scrapped Call of Duty cue paid for it; a Marvel teaser launched it. Vince Staples' second album dropped two weeks behind its own lead single, already in a trailer, already in a feature film. The release plan was the marketing plan, and that's worth lifting. "What Call of Duty gave me to do one song that they didn't even use was more than my whole album budget." That's Vince Staples on Drink Champs, in the clip that has be

Why a Composer's Visual Identity Sells the Sync. A composer's note on building visual identity for artist projects, including the ones that exist only for sync. Side project doesn't mean side effort. The picture has to land before the song does. The supervisor opens DISCO at 2pm. Twelve playlists in the queue. Three briefs on the desk. She's scrolling, not listening yet. Artwork, name, one-line bio. That's the door. Most

The creative industries love to talk about collaboration, passion, and opportunity. But behind the polished campaigns, viral adverts, and cinematic brand films is an uncomfortable reality: many creatives are being systematically undervalued by the very production companies that rely on them. For freelancers working in music, design, videography, photography, editing, sync, and content creation, the lack of standardised rates and expectations has created an environment where e

One of the most overlooked parts of sync is the long game. People talk a lot about landing placements, but not enough about what happens after. A good sync doesn’t always end with one campaign. Sometimes the real value comes years later through relicensing, renewals, cutdowns, online usage, regional adaptations, and entirely new brands discovering the same track. A while back, I submitted a demo for an advert. It got rejected. That could have been the end of the story. Instea

As a sync agent, there’s nothing better than discovering an artist organically. Recently, I came across an artist online and immediately headed to Spotify to check them out. Within seconds of hearing the first track, I was hooked. The music had personality, emotion, and a clear artistic identity, exactly the kind of thing that catches my attention for sync. A week later, we were already on a call together. This time, I wasn’t listening as a fan, I was listening as a sync agen

January. A Sony Publishing co-write. Two writers, one room, one laptop. One of them typed a working title from the session they had had the week before into Suno. Ninety seconds later it gave them back a passable demo of a song that, by any deal either of them had signed, was not supposed to exist. They closed the laptop. They kept writing. Nobody called a lawyer, because no songwriter has ever won by calling a lawyer first. The two settlements that landed last autumn, UMG wi

Tuesday brief, Friday lock. Three days to clear, license, and deliver across territories. The supervisors we trust are picking from whatever the publishers can clear in that window, because the math doesn't work any other way. That isn't a taste problem. That's a calendar problem. And it's reshaping who gets in the room before anyone gets to hear the song. Thoughts?

Every sync cuts two cheques. One shrank in 2025. The other kept growing. The trade only printed the one that shrank. By the numbers $641m: what flowed to labels and recordings worldwide in 2025 −2.0%: that figure's drop on the year, the first since 2020 ~$1.55bn: what flowed to US songwriters and publishers in 2024 ~$2.2bn+: a rough floor for the global sync economy The line they printed, the line they didn't Every sync cuts two cheques. One to the recording. One to the song.

Cannes gave the year's top audio prize to a campaign whose own case study boasted "$0 spent on music rights." Then Sony arrived. São Paulo. June 2025. Africa Creative DDB picked up the Audio & Radio Grand Prix for Budweiser's One Second Ads. Plus a Gold. Sixty-eight million TikTok impressions. Beyoncé. Kendrick Lamar. Foo Fighters. One second of each. No clearance. The Cannes case study said the quiet part out loud. The campaign used "the minimum fans need to recognize a song

Primary Wave just bought the publisher that defined "I don't want a major" for two decades. Twelve months on from a string of indie sales, the indie-admin tier looks thinner than it has in years, and a real question is on the board. On 23 March 2026, Primary Wave Music signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kobalt Music Group from Francisco Partners. The deal values Kobalt at roughly $1.5 billion, with the combined company sitting around $7 billion, and Brookfield investing