Are there people out there who just know lots of songs and get asked to share their wisdom? Do they just look at a particular genre and keep looking till they find the right one?
An example from Breaking Bad is Freestyle by Taalbi Brothers. Who is responsible for this and how do they do it?
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Yes, there are people who realy know lots and lots of music. They are not rare, many radio stations employ them too.
There are sound designers who’s job is to comb through archives to find stuff that fits the movie. Not only for songs but things like sound effects too.
It’s a full time job for these people so I’m sure they have techniques to help narrow down the search, but at the end of the day it could just simply be spending hours and hours a week finding music that fits what you’re looking for.
And this doesn’t even mention that some movies will hire artists to make music specifically for that film. Ranging from small time bands to full orchestra composers.
Nowadays they just use youtube. Type in the mood you want and you get hundreds of results. Pretty easy. My brother’s uncle does similar work and gets paid $350k for 8 mins of work a day.
I’ve always wondered about this when hearing a uniquely perfect song for a movie/tv scene, but never looked into it. Great question!
They tag songs so when they are looking for “sad” “70s” “aliens” “end credits” they have narrowed it down to 1000 instead of a million.
The job you’re describing is a Music Supervisor. It’s their responsibility to help bring creative ideas to the table, license them and do it all within a budget.
The producers have the final day of what songs get used, sometimes they already know what they want to use and the music supervisor just has to budget out their desires.
The music supervisor on Breaking Bad was Thomas Golubic and he brought most if not all of the songs to that project.
Music Supervisors get sent music from record labels, publishers, indie artists as well as searching around the web themselves.
Hope this helps!
Movie and TV producers often have “temp tracks”, the songs and sounds they use to track a scene before the composer writes the score. A lot of them then ask the composers to write something that sounds like their temp track, or use the temp track. Sometimes the song is in the script, and an intentional parallel by the screenwriter, sometimes the producers rework the scene to fit their temp track. That’s my understanding.
I mean – few people would know who *The Shins* are if they weren’t prominently featured in *Garden State*. People who are in Hollywood have a lot more access to up-and-coming artists plus indy labels where they can cull talent. Some are original compositions, for example you will find Max Richter friggin everywhere writing music to make TV/Movies nice and emotional. In other words, the movie/TV industry takes the soundtrack extremely seriously, it can sink or swim a movie or TV series.
I had been hired in the late 2000’s to do this for the intermission for our local city theater. I spent hours trying to find music that went with the play they were doing, browsing the iTunes catalog. Bought all the tracks myself and burned a CD (as you did in those days). Felt like an imposter. Never asked back, probably because they might have had higher expectations of me than I was prepared to deliver–i should not have been the only sound guy for that place, I was fresh out of one of those audio recording schools. But hey, I did that thing.
Fun fact: some small film or documentary producers will actually choose music first, then edit the scene to fit the music.
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