Music Supervisors Tell You What They DON’T Like In A Contact Email
Music supervisors are the new music kings and queens and everyone seems to want to contact them in the hopes that they’ll pick some of their music for a film or television show. There’s lots of advice out there about the best practices when sending an email, but not much on what really turns them off – until now.
In a great article in Disco, Adele Ho of Supergroup Sonic Branding, Michael Sherwood from Big Picture, and Jonathan Hecht from Venn Arts share what they don’t like to see in an email pitch.
Don’t:
• Require logging in to access the files.
• Include anything that has clearance issues.
• Send files with bad metadata, or files that aren’t organized.
• Call, text to follow up and ask me if I’ve seen your blast, listened to anything and what I think. “I’ll let you know. ;)” – Adele Ho
• Include the entire artist roster in the body of the newsletter.
• Include links that expire.
• Send anything that’s off the table for licensing, either because the artist isn’t interested or the samples haven’t been cleared.
• Text, call or send private social media messages to make sure I’ve seen something. “I don’t like to receive random phone calls without a scheduled appointment.” – Michael Hecht
• Send tracks with missing track numbers or track titles.
• Put the company name in any of the metadata fields other than the Comments or Grouping.
• Use 15 keywords in the genre field instead of an actual genre. Artist names in the track title field.
• Use bad capitalization. “These are all things I have to spend time fixing and making judgement calls on.” – Michael Sherwood
Finally, there’s one piece of advice from Michael Sherwood that is usually overlooked but very critical.
• “Please, please, please, send AIFs instead of WAVs. They are essentially identical, but unless both the sender and receiver know what they’re doing, WAVs carry NO METADATA. You wouldn’t send a CD with a sharpie-written label and a blank sleeve, and that’s what WAVs are.”
There’s a lot more useful info in the post, including a number of DO’s in contacting music supervisors that may surprise you. Read it here.
