Whether you’re a music company or an artist in general, there comes a point in your career when you have to ask yourself a question, how do people, and how can you get your music on TV shows, Video games, and in commercials. Needless to say that if you manage to do so, your career as a musician will take a giant leap forward. So on behalf of the entire music industry let’s clarify exactly how would you go about making the above stated happen?
The first thing that you need to learn is the fact that there is a person out there who’s title is the “music supervisor”. A music supervisor is a person whose main and only job is to go over songs and select the few that meet the required standard for their upcoming project. In other words, a music supervisor is a person who you need to send your E-mail to!
How to find a music supervisor?
However it may sound, it isn’t as complicated as it seems. For starters, music supervisors are individuals which are open to the public, and a minimum amount of research will get you a few E-mail from music supervisors which are currently working on music for an upcoming commercial, movie or video game. Bear in mind, that not every music supervisor is looking for what you have to offer, so what you should do is just look for shows that play your genre of music and contact those music supervisors.
For example if you watch Love & Hip Hop they play hip hop and relationship songs all throughout the show so if you make songs catered toward those topics you need to contact their music supervisor and submit your music to them.There music supervisors name is Doug Bernheim this is his link to contact him on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougbernheim . Please don’t just start spamming him with your music .(I explain below the proper way to contact them thru email)
What to do and what not to do
First thing’s first, you need to write an E-mail that actually makes sense. What do we mean by this? It’s a well-known fact that music supervisors get hundreds of E-mail daily, so you need to make your E-mail stand out. The first thing that any music supervisor hates most is an E-mail that has an MP3 attached to it. Its clutters up their inbox, so your E-mail will probably go to the trash can, and will probably get blocked as well! What you should do is simply put a subject line that looks something like “a song with a lot of hype”.
Doing this will pique the interest of almost anybody, and in doing so will almost guarantee that your E-mail gets opened.
What should your E-mail contain?
Like we have mentioned before, under no circumstance should you attach your mixtape covers or mp3’s file to your mail. What you should do is upload your music to popular online multimedia sharing services like SoundCloud, this will allow your E-mail to only have a couple of lines of text including the link to your music. Doing this will almost certainly make your music supervisor of choice open the link and at least listen to a couple of seconds of your work. If your music is what he or she was looking for, you might be on your way to become a star.
Another thing that we feel that we should mention is the fact that a lot of music supervisors tend to use instrumentals instead of full tracks, so be sure to upload an instrumental of your work, and an acapella version and attach the link to your E-mail as well.
Other methods
There are other ways for you to get your songs to be listened to without going through all of the trouble we talked about. We are of course talking about companies like ASCAP or BMI. However, if you chose this method you need to know that it will cost you some money. On one hand, companies like these ask the user to pay a fee, or they sign a contract with you which allows them to take a part of your profit if your song gets on TV.Doing this type of business can prove to be profitable for you as these companies tend to communicate with music supervisors on a daily basis and furthermore, they have a relationship that lasts a long time.
In conclusion
Whichever method you wish to use to get your music featured in T.V. shows and in video games, you need to realize that things won’t happen on their own, you need to be persistent in what you do, and never stop grinding.. Keep going strong and pave your way to the big leagues.
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