The first thing you need to wrap your head around is…
You’re ALREADY writing music for film and TV.
Yes, even if you’re writing in an incredibly weird and niche sub-genre, there is room for your music in films and/or TV and/or video games and/or advertising.
Don’t believe me?
Read on!
Music On TV Shows
Here’s a playlist with 7 tracks from current TV shows (writing this in January 2018).
Have you listened to all 7 tracks, even for just 30 short seconds? Did you notice anything?
Yep. They’re all different!
And before you accuse me of picking and choosing to prove my point, I really didn’t…. and I can prove it 😉
Here’s EXACTLY what I did to come up with these 7 examples of music in TV shows:
1- I typed “top tv shows in 2017” in Google.
2- I picked the first 5 shows that showed up in the search results. Then, when I realized screenshots of my process would be nice and went back to Google to do that exact same search a few days later, “The Good Place” had made the top 5, pushing “Stranger Things” to #6 so I just went and added a video from “The Good Place” in the playlist!
3- I went on YouTube, typed the name of the show and picked the first video that seemed relevant.
4- For the last show I went through, I went and picked another random track. Why did I do that? I wanted to demonstrate that one TV show can feature different genres of music.
Luckily (or exactly to my point! 😉 ), my assumption proved correct and I ended up with 7 widely different tunes.
Now let’s have a look at music in advertising which we often think is completely stereotyped and must fit a very specific genre.
Music For Advertising
Here are 6 examples of music in advertising for you:
For this playlist of music in adverts, I went through this exact process:
1- I typed “superbowl advertisements 2017” (so all the ads aired around the same time and there wouldn’t be any question of music “trends”)