A song search needs to happen for your approaching ad campaign. Who will do it? What is the creative brief? Who has the final say about the song choice? Is the client, the in-house marketing department, or the Creative Director? What is the budget? When does that choice to be made and be cleared by?

Before streaming services, music supervisors and producers would go to retailers, spend hours, days and a lot of cash buying vinyl records, tapes, CDs, etc.; collect what they thought they’d need for an exhaustive search and submit their choices to their client. Obviously, this took time with multiple trips to music stores, as well as asking labels to send submissions.

Doing song searches is a thankless job. No matter what, the creative director invariably, will only want to pursue a song that she/he/they found – not some music super. 

Song searches are fun when you have good people that like doing them and are really good at it. If you love music, you are going to naturally have biases to work around. You need to drop your cultivated “good taste” and find the right song!

Now whenever we do song searches, we simultaneously pick the best songs creatively. Part of our research is conducting a thorough history of advertising uses of whatever song is in consideration – finding out who used it and when and for how long; also to see if there are any current uses that would immediately take it off the table. We never would submit a song to a client, knowing that there could be licensing problems, no matter how creatively perfect it was for the campaign. It’s a balancing act of wanting to please the creative director, finding that killer song that can be licensed within the client’s budget and within the given time restrictions. 

The ad music song search is technically easier these days that makes for a lot of very rich listening and thousands of choices. There are indeed infinite choices and resources to find music for your project today. In addition to the major labels, Independent labels are everywhere and have so much great material available. This is all good for the creative side.

Generally, music streaming services are a great tool for both producers, creative teams and music supervisors. The challenge still, is finding the right song and artist that’s fits your target audience and is clearable, in budget, and all that rights can be secured within your time line.

Michael Welsh is founder/CEO of Michael Welsh Productions, Inc. – a company specializing in music licensing and supervision for advertising only, for over 30 years.