Why Researching And Referencing Is Crucial For Sync Licensing

I am Randy Kalsi. Welcome to my video tutorials. Today I want to show you why referencing and researching successful songs is super important in order to get your songs licenced to TV and film. So without further ado, let’s get into it. I think it’s useful to be able to reference songs that have already been placed that have currently been placed and to see the style of the song, how it’s been produced has been written the themes. There are so many different genres that fit into the sync market and I guess it’s about finding songs that you feel close to that you feel are similar to yours and then creating something unique with those ideas in mind from the reference songs. This is a website called tunefind.com. It’s one of my favourite websites. It has a full list of songs that have been placed in TV shows and movies. There are also the website for songs placed in ads which we can talk about in another video so literally what you would do is pick a favourite movie let’s just say for arguments sake Grey’s Anatomy You’ve got the show there you click on the show and usually I go for the most recent season because that’s the most current music and you know it’s literally a matter of browsing through the songs, finding something that you relate to and creating something similar just from now for demonstration purposes. I will show you the song by Jamie N Commons it’s called Not Gonna Break me and it’s here. So how many times has this song been placed one episode here another episode another episode a large number of TV shows and he’s doing really well look how many songs has got licensed because he focuses on the Sync market. So here we are in my DAW. I have the song by Jamie n Commons here and I have my original song. What is it that I was looking for in Jamie’s song and what is it that inspired me to write a song similar to that it could also get licensed. The first thing I noticed or I looked for was ok… what’s the theme of the song and the theme of Jamie’s song is you’re not going to break me. I’m going to overpower you. I’m still going to be successful and strong. So I was like ok this is a powerful theme so I decided to quite simply called my theme Strong and I wrote the entire lyrics around that theme what else did I look for the production style, the energy… It’s hard hitting, there’s heavy percussion and it’s a driving song. So we’ll have a listen to Jamie’s song and then we’ll have a listen to mine. You’ll be able to see the similarities yet the fact that they completely songs. So here is Jamie’s song first. This is my version. So you can see there are similarities in terms of theme and drive and it’s percussive but you know it’s a completely different song and this song got licensed to Crucial Music so it just goes to show that referencing does work. Here is another example. This is one of my clients Lindsay and for a certain part of the song she chose the Greatest Showman song From Now On as a reference so I Incorporated the ideas into her song. She wanted it driven. She liked the percussion and she like the openness of it. Let’s have a listen. Ok, and this is the song that produce for Lindsay. It’s similar, but it’s definitely not the same S o there you have it in my opinion referencing is definitely not copying it’s really useful and it really helps give you some focus and direction because at the end of the day we all wanna make money from our music and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we just see what others are doing, get the ideas and create something original and unique. So that’s it guys Hope you enjoyed the video and it was helpful. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and if you’d like to know how I can help you with your songs visit my website www.syncsongwriting.com
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