Though a number of commercial spots rely upon pop culture music -- ranging from rock hits of decades past to the familiar strains of Sam Spence that accompanied many NFL Films programs -- to help sell their wares, there remains a huge amount of scoring for other commercial and corporate work, ranging from techno to symphonic in style.

Refining the search process

Once the sole composer at New York-based Omni Music, President and Senior Music Producer Doug Wood now has 85 composers writing for the company. "There's a lot of change going on in both technical and aesthetic matters," he acknowledges. "There isn't a [deliverables] standard or a strong indication of a single format taking over; users seem to want a variety of formats. This creates both challenges and opportunities for us: how to make the music available to the greatest number of people."

Wood notes that despite quality issues, many users are still content to use MP3s. "Those can be downloaded from our site or we can zap them over via the Net. Other clients want our entire library on a hard drive, so they can offload to their own proprietary systems. Large hard-drive systems seem very attractive, mainly because [users] can hear anything and drag it directly into their set-up with a mouse click."

Wood thinks that the speed and efficiency of this approach contributed to the fairly speedy downfall of compact discs. "We thought CDs would last a long while, but despite the CD advantage in sound quality and relative indestructibility, you still have to take the thing off the shelf, handle it physically then later re-shelve it. When someone is looking for that perfect piece of music on a tight schedule, that kind of effort cuts into the search time."

Refining the search process is a major goal. "With the unbelievable amount of material available, more sophisticated means to refine searches are essential," he declares. "Usually you can either search quickly or with great depth, but not both. I love it when somebody asks if we have a piece with a sax lead, electric piano and base drums -- that's easy to find. But when folks employ more abstract terms and want a particular feel or mood, describing it only as something jazzy, that's harder to define -- do they mean Jerry Mulligan or U2? Building an intelligent database that can gauge people's intents is the ultimate goal."

Looking at trends in musical styles, Wood sees a greater need for sound bites rather than full pieces of music, and Omni Music unveiled a new scoring library at NAB with pieces that reflect this approach.

"Instead of a classical eight-bar phrase, there is more demand for a drumbeat and bass line approach, which makes the music editing process easier in post," says Wood. "This often features a repeating but evolving bed of music that captures an immediate feeling instead of wading through the traditional intro and bridge."

Wood notes that "whether you rely on a traditional approach or something more trendy, music is still the cheapest way to get a lot of points across in a spot. I dare any station to air Seinfeld without the music track. You don't know it is there 'til it's gone, and then everyone'd be wondering, 'What happened to the show?'"

Meeting clients' needs

At Non-Stop Music, Mike Dowdle, president and co-founder of the Salt Lake City company, reports that the CD remains the predominant delivery vehicle for his customers. "But we are finding an increased interest in electronic files, though it is not yet widespread. Depending on production platforms, that interest seems to relate to either .WAV or .AIF files."

Although the company's music files are already digitized, Non-Stop, now in its third decade of operation, has not begun distributing the catalog via hard drive. "Before that happens, we believe it is necessary to have a highly-functional search engine embedded with the data," says Dowdle. "At this point, many larger users like CBS access MSOFT, which specializes in music content and delivers our product and that of other well-established libraries for broadcast and film production, along with their own proprietary search system."

In addition to the Non-Stop US music library, the company also licenses product from a variety of international sources, including a source cue library out of China; a more traditional orchestral library from Japan; and two German providers, one with a distinctly modern European sound and another featuring a full complement of classical offerings.

With respect to new trends in scoring, Dowdle observes that, "film people seem to be favoring mainstream or traditional sounding music that features a twist. We have begun producing material that includes orchestral elements, but can be enlivened with a dance groove or club sound. These pieces are produced both in straight-up orchestral format and with the rich, highly-produced deeper kind of sound."

The company's Attitude series, one of 83 CDs in their product line, includes 36 cues that reflect this technique of making the traditional seem more contemporary; but of equal importance, Non Stop also releases a variety of versions for each piece. "There are the full-length versions that can be cut on a desktop, 30-second ones on CD, plus other lengths available upon request," Dowdle explains. "We have a full-service FTP site, so delivery to clients can happen in a matter of minutes, with access via a discrete password-protected folder."

Customized service

At the Carrollton, Texas-based FirstCom Music, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer Ken Nelson sees the company's approach to dealing with post facilities as a service-oriented one. "It's not just a matter of delivering a laundry list of CDs, but rather a much more comprehensive approach. We offer 13 catalogs from all over the world, and some of our writers are Grammy- and Emmy-winners, including an outstanding roster of TV and film composers who make up our Masters Series."

FirstCom is able to address a wide variety of requests by drawing on those international resources. "We range from big symphonic sound down to the solo electronic sound designer doing contemporary stuff," Nelson remarks. "A lot of orchestral recordings use The Jerusalem Symphony and The Tel Aviv Symphony as well as The London Symphony Orchestra, but also recruit new talent to address contemporary sound issues."

FirstCom also offers an on-line service with 32,000 cues available for audition and download. "That includes every single version of the pieces on our CDs, not just limited to 10- or 30-second clips," he elaborates. Once you're a client here, you can use the MusiQuick® search engine to look through the listings by key word, descriptive word, application, style or any combination thereof. You can also save the auditioned selections you like into a project file that can be shared with others, whether they are across the hall or across country. You can download your entire project list, in either 256K MP3 or .AIF files that are full CD-quality audio."

For customers at post facilities who want customized tracks, the company offers QuickTraxsm on DVD-ROM. "QuickTraxsm provides a kind of bridge between custom music and library music, allowing you to remix the library track yourself on Avid, Pro Tools or Media 100 systems. The DVD-ROM [which is packaged along with the CD audio disk] has a number of folders representing the components that make up the music track. Three or four audio tracks can be mixed together for the full stereo version, or you can omit one or more tracks for different customized effects, such as isolating the trumpet so it surges up in the mix or taking it out altogether. Since full-blown custom music can be a hit-and-miss affair, dependent upon the composer and the amount of time and money involved, we're finding more ad agency clients now willing to use the library because of this new ability to customize the sound."

Significant enhancements to the existing MusiQuick® on-line service are expected to be introduced, including batch downloading. For facilities lacking Net access, FirstCom will set them up with a nearby server.