Needledrop Changes the Soundtrack Tune

By Carl "Ratso" Russo

Music composers sing the same lament with charges that producers push the soundtrack to the bottom of the priority list. "There's a 60-thousand dollar video and they give one or two thousand dollars for the sound," explains Bay Area composer Scott Singer, whose theme for "P.M./Evening Magazine" netted him an Emmy Award. "People haven't trained their ears like they've trained their eyes, and consequently, the budgets haven't gone along." It is precisely for this reason, many composers insist, that the use of music libraries has proliferated.

Music or "needledrop" libraries can be a producer's best friend and a tunesmith's worst nightmare. This is especially true in smaller markets like San Francisco where many of the city's ad agencies and local network TV affiliates will go out of town to have a commercial or show scored.

"Needledrop is killing the custom composer," warns Singer.

Libraries offer a full array of generic musical offerings--from simple jingles to 100-piece orchestra soundtracks-- often for a fraction of the price otherwise spent procuring live music. The producer who lacks the budget to hire a composer, musicians, a recording studio and technicians will find needledrop a welcome money-saver.

Mostly used to accompany visuals in industrial videos and commercials, needledrop has found its way into the entire soundtracks of lower-budget feature films ("Night of the Living Dead") and the occasional television program ("Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," "Real People"). It can be used as a motivational sales tool to make a product seem more exciting than it is or sell a movie audience on the story's intended emotional impact. The list of entertainments using a combination of commissioned music and ersatz mood and source (period) music goes on and on.

But whatever convenience music libraries offer is traded for quality of content, according to some. "I can't say that [needledrop] is really high-end work," says Greg Sudmeier, composer and musical coordinator for Lucasfilm. "It's cut-and-paste, it's not real artistry."

Mark Adler, who composed and arranged source music for the film "Henry and June," says, "From a philosophical standpoint the idea of off-the-shelf music to be made to work with a pre-existing scene is a bit of an anathema to me." Citing Stanley Kubrick's successful use of classical music in "2001: A Space Odyssey" as one of a few exceptions, he states that needledrop "denies that there's something so unique about your film that it doesn't deserve something custom-fit. There's an emotional complexity to what you're seeing on screen if it's a good project. It's never just happy, sad, fast, slow. I haven't heard a lot of library music that is layered in that way. It tends to paint fairly broad pictures."

Magic Tracs, a royalty-free service whose repertoire is typical of many smaller needledrop houses, has a recorded telephone demo where one can hear samples of "a nice training industrial piece with a great positive feel!" or "an excellent sports theme with upbeat, aggressive action!"

Naturally, in a business where "bottom line" is the only language spoken, needledrop is often an independent producer's sole option for music. Says one local producer who asked not to be identified, "In most cases original music is a luxury we can't afford. The libraries have everything we need as far as our [corporate] videos go. In fact, I doubt our client could tell the difference half the time."

A producer may enter into three basic types of licensing agreements with a music library. The most common is the "annual blanket," wherein the media (compact disc or LP record) is purchased per year for the right to unlimited use.

A "per usage" or "good-faith" agreement depends on the honesty of the producer. Fees are charged for each reported usage on a "needledrop" basis, and vary by nature of the production. A traveling slide show for schools would not be charged as much as a network series. Libraries will often renegotiate if the production is duplicated on audio or video tape or if the music ends up on an ancillary commercial release as a soundtrack album. Of course, usage is not always easy to track. "There's a fairly heavy cheat factor," admits one insider.

Dennis Reed, president of Soper Sound Music Library in Palo Alto, lays claim to inventing the concept of the "buyout license." Reed and his partner Bruce Hemmingway act as contractors by hiring composers and musicians to build up a library of original music. A purchaser pays a one-time fee (usually 2 CDs for $285) to retain the rights for 99 years. Soper Sound then pays the performers a royalty based on a percentage of the net of the sale.

A trip to Kaleidosound in China Basin is like walking into a hallowed room of sounds, stocked to the ceiling with more than a million musical selections and effects. Forrest Patten, the library's jovial proprietor, is not the schlockmaster of cut-rate jingles one might expect. Although he refers to his business as "the McDonald's of production music," his impressive list of credits reveal a unique talent for finding that perfect piece of music.

"I'm sort of a Sherlock Holmes," says Patten. Aside from selling to a steady stream of corporate and commercial clients, Kaleidosound has provided source music for numerous features including The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities and the Police Academy series.

Aside from the music he has collected since the 1950s, Patten's catalog is made up of 90 music libraries, much of it imported from Europe to circumvent restrictions imposed by domestic unions like the American Federation of Musicians. "Where else for such a minimal amount of money could you get an entire Beethoven symphony?" he asks.

Budget and deadline are always important considerations, but Patten believes needledrop is an invaluable service for another reason: "As a producer coming in for a specific assignment, you get to hear exactly what you're getting." He offers a scenario of the producer who cannot communicate his ideas to the composer, which can be an expensive problem. Other times the composer's musical ideas are so specific the two individuals never get in sync, according to Patten.

To add insult to injury, composers are often put in the position of having to imitate pre-existing music to appease their clients. One local songwriter recalls a producer who approached him with a theme song she was sure came from a cheap needledrop library. Her request: Could he come up with something similar? The music turned out to be an orchestrated network news theme penned by John Williams! "His fee was bigger than her entire budget!" the composer says.

Directors and editors are known to steal music from other sources when assembling a "temp" mix for a rough cut of a film. "It's never shown commercially, it's just dubbed in for feel, and I've heard it said many times that it drives composers nuts when the director says,'Make it like the temp music,'" comments Steve Shurtz, director of operations for Berkeley's Fantasy Studios. He says that such music is generally good, often borrowed from another soundtrack, and the composer inevitably balks at the thought of having to plagiarize someone's work.

But collaboration is a part of the game, believes Shurtz. He feels that although composers work in a "very high art form," they must compromise the minute they are thrown into a film project. "Composers are never going to be 100 percent happy. It's extremely difficult to share a vision," says Shurtz. "This is why there are so many 'creative differences' in the trade."

Along with the debate comes an acknowledgment from some camps that the quality of needledrop music is finally beginning to improve. As Patten observes, "The problem in the past was that music libraries sounded 'canned' or 'stock'--very old fashioned. But what has happened over the years as the libraries themselves have changed and evolved, they've gotten a lot more commercial sounding." The word "laserdrop" has been coined to describe the musical fare available on compact discs that make up a greater part of today's libraries. Some have started employing optical discs that can be accessed by computer.

Greg Jones, partner in Anderson Jones Music and house composer for Colossal Pictures, sees the improvement as a benefit to people in his field. "There are many projects that should be scored with needledrop," he says, adding that he is now freer to "custom score, bring out characters [and] dramatic action. Whereas before they would try to shoehorn me into a project when all they really wanted were big chunks of music to paste into the picture."

Will the needledrop dilemma ever end on a happy note? Possibly. By one estimate music libraries have doubled in the last decade. Since many are of the production buyout variety, more composers than ever will be needed to build up collections. Soper Sound almost exclusively hires Bay Area composers and musicians.

In addition, the explosion of digital technologies such as sequencing software for the Macintosh computer allows people like corporate industrial composer Marshall Crutcher to actually compete. He says that a producer can spend the $1000 allotted for needledrop on original music, which the client will always prefer. "The next time the producer comes around, the budget for music is upped." Dennis Reed adds, "The quicker an original music composer can knock out a song, the more he can cut the music libraries."

Reed also reminds composers of the importance of self-marketing: "Stay on mailing lists!" Like an actor, part of the job is selling oneself. But of course, Reed cautions, the music should "be good enough for album release. A lot of crap is submitted."

The notion of a coexistence seems desirable for most parties involved. As Forrest Patten says, "I don't want to see composers go by the wayside. We have a lot of talent here in the Bay Area and every one of the composers has their own specific styles and personalities, as the libraries do."

If an awareness of the importance of music in film increases throughout the industry, and there is every indication that it will, composers stand to benefit the most. Documentary composer Todd Boekelheide ("Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam," "Hearts of Darkness") sums it up best: "Filmmakers may be losing out on a chance to be surprised by somebody. Surprise is one of the best elements of the collaborative process. The results often enrich everybody's working vocabulary and enrich the product."

[Reprinted with permission from Film/Tape World, July 1991]