Here is a story ending with a brand getting exactly what they paid for.

The brand needs music for a big campaign. They want something upbeat, on-brand, cleared and ready to go. So the brand went to a marketplace and paid $250, put it in the campaign, shipped everything, and moved on. The budget didn’t budge and the music was handled.

Six months later they are at it again. Different campaign, same process. Same marketplace, another $250 and one forgettable track. And their campaign sounds like every other brand in their category.

The brand paid an invoice of $250 without understanding how high the cost would really be.

THE LINE-ITEM PROBLEM

This is common in the advertising industry because it is easy to do. Brands treat music the way people treated CD’s back in the day: something you buy once and then replace when the need comes around. But buying a forgettable track is an outdated way of branding. It costs them more than they realize. Campaigns are meant to grab attention; music is a part of building the brand voice. Licensing a boring track that every other brand also licensed tells customers there is nothing about your brand setting you apart from anyone else. So they treat you as expendable. What a waste of branding talent.

Here is what the line-item mentality actually produces:

The audio doesn’t compound because there is no connection to the brand. The thread between campaigns is non-existent. Visual identity with brands helps tie together everything the brand stands for using color and images. Great copy persuades. And audio? Audio and music should do the same thing. The sound should connect to the visual identity. Instead, there is no association and brand memory built around sound.

Licensing a piece of music from a marketplace at $250 seems like a fast win. And it is for the financial budget. But most of the time it isn't a one-stop deal, which means the master and publishing rights are not controlled by a single party. When your campaign grows legs, or picked up by media outlets, or when a supervisor uses it in production, this is when the rights structure you skipped over starts to matter. Retroactive clearance is expensive. 

Ask any brand that has been through the clearance ringer and what it costs to replace a track after a campaign is already in production. There are the rush licensing fees bumped up, supervisor time, and agency hours spent re-editing a new track. The cheap license savings disappears fast.

If your music runs through a production agency or creative shop, there is a big chance you will pay a mark-up on top of the underlying license cost. Licensing a $2500 track against a $4000 budget? This is how the business works. And it means most brands have no idea what they are actually paying for music.

THE COMPOUNDING PROBLEM

The attention economy needs a willing audience to work. Anytime someone picks up their phone or stares at a screen is the attention economy at work. Audiences absorb the sounds of a brand. The Netflix “Ta-Dum” is a great example of a deliberate and repeated sonic choice made over time until the sound becomes a part of the brand. This doesn’t happen with one campaign and is instead the product of consistency. In this case, Netflix uses the audio logo across all touchpoints, formats, and campaigns until the audience doesn’t even need to see the logo to know who it is.

While the Netflix audio logo isn’t music, music can have the same compounding effect. An old but great example is United Airlines using George Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue” over all of their marketing campaigns. So when a brand treats the music being used in a campaign as a line item, they opt out any compounding effect. And this is the real cost of using cheap music which leads to brand equity never being built.

WHAT THE MATH ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Here is a simple version of the numbers.

Brand A licenses makes four campaigns per year and pays $800 after any marketplace fees and agency mark ups. No campaigns have any continuity. Their total music spend per year is $3200 and their brand recognition built on sound is zero.

Brand B treats audio as a channel. They spend one quarter building a sonic identity, or a defined sound palette. They might use a set of pre-cleared tracks sharing a sonic fingerprint plus a specific brief that gives their creative team something to work from. The upfront cost is higher, but their per-campaign music spend drops by not starting from scratch each time. All of their campaigns sound like one cohesive brand. While brand A will spend years searching for the right track, Brand B has an owned audio identity in the marketplace.

THE SHIFT: FROM COST CENTER TO BRAND CHANNEL

What did we learn from the lesson above? Well, the brands who get it right have a different focus and way they spend money on audio. They treat sound the same way they treat their visual identity, as a brand output.

So how do you do this? You need to define the sound of your brand before you listen to any music. A sonic identity brief gives every campaign a starting point and asks the right questions. What feeling should the music create? What sonic references do you want to own? What do you want to move away from?

From there, pre-clear any number of licenses before you commit. Working with a music catalog or library offering one-stop licensing, where the master and publishing is cleared by a single part, will eliminate licensing risk and speed up production. Cleared music just ships faster.

Make sure your brand builds a relationship with the catalog of music and not a single track. What I mean by this is brands returning to a consistent set of composers, catalogs, and partners will build something coherent over time. Sounds begin to accumulate and the brand will be recognizable by ear.

THREE QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU SIGN OFF ON MUSIC SPEND

Are you a brand buyer, a creative director, or a CMO needing to sign off on music budgets? Here are three questions to ask before any campaigns moves into production.

1. Is this music pre-cleared and the master and publishing controlled by a single party? If not, what is your clearance plan if the campaign scales?

2. Does this track connect to anything you have done before? If a viewer heard this spot and last year's spot back to back, would they sound like the same brand?

3. Are you treating music as a cost to minimize or a channel to invest in? The answer to that question is showing up in your campaigns whether you have made it explicitly or not.

Brands winning by using sound ask themselves these questions. From there, they build a brand identity connecting with their customers. 

The Sync Brief is published every other week by Playbutton Media. Pre-cleared sync catalog and sonic identity services at playbuttonmedia.com.