All Posts

CRAFTED / Where the score went, Part 1 of 3 A composer on the year the Grammys and BAFTA finally admitted that serious composing talent now works in video games, and the same year's Grammy ballot that showed they still don't know how to judge it. Los Angeles. The first of February. Austin Wintory walked up to collect a Grammy for Sword of the Sea, Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media, a title so long it sounds like an apology. The category didn't

When I first started out trying to break into music production and composing for TV, basically taking any audio job I could get my hands on, the thing that actually paid the bills and got me moving was music editing. I had a really good run with it. Two series of Phoenix Rise on the BBC, and off the back of that, a steady stream of smaller jobs for a year or two. It was the thing that took me from "trying to do this" to "doing this full time." Looking back, it was probably th

There's a version of this article you've probably read a dozen times. Home recording got cheap, a teenager made a Grammy-winning album in a bedroom, the big studios are either dying or clinging on by offering "vintage gear" and "expert engineers" as a kind of last-resort selling point. It's a tidy story. It's also not quite true, and 25 years of being in and out of studios, first as a teenager sweeping floors and watching sessions, more recently sitting in on a string quartet

Music has always been a powerful force that brings people together. Yet, the way we categorise music into genres seems to be shifting. Are music genres becoming less defined? Are concert crowds more diverse than before? And could this be because fewer new music genres are emerging? These questions reveal interesting changes in how we experience music today. The Changing Nature of Music Genres Genres once served as clear labels that helped listeners find music they liked. Rock

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

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

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.

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

Big Fish Theory Was Paid For By A Song Nobody Played Vince Staples got a cheque from Call of Duty for one song. The game never used it. The fee, by his own account on Drink Champs, was bigger than the entire budget for his second album. A scrapped cue, one that never made it into a single cutscene, quietly outdid the record it went on to fund. The record it funded was Big Fish Theory, Def Jam and Blacksmith, out 23 June 2017. You'll probably remember the goldfish on the cove