Music Supervision: Selecting and Licensing Music for Media
This course explores the field of music supervision, which is an in-demand field due to the increased use of existing songs in TV shows, films, live events, advertisements, websites, and other media. This course reviews the entire music supervision process, from choosing the perfect song/lyric to strategies for securing licensing with artists and publishers, and offers students a hands-on opportunity to make music selections fit a variety of media, as well as structuring licensing/contract deals for composers, publishers, and record companies. The final project involves networking with songwriting majors, contemporary writing and production majors, students from Berklee Online, and external rights holders to license and place music into a series of scenes and advertisements. Students learn how to work effectively on a production team, locate resources for licensable music, offer creative options, select and license appropriate music, combine music with a variety of media, and generate detailed license requests, agreements, and cue sheets. The student gains a thorough understanding of the elements that make a piece of music a perfect fit for a production, in addition to addressing the needs of both the project (directors and producers) and the rights holders (writers, publishers, and master owners). The course will explore the viewpoints of publishers, songwriters/composers, master owners, and executive producers, in order to gain skills needed to effectively work within the creative and budgetary aspects of combining music and other media.