Demand exploded for The Lumineers' song ?Ho Hey? after it appeared in an episode of CW?s ?Hart of Dixie? last year. (photo: Shelley Mays / File / The Tennessean)
The opening chords begin playing just as Barney gets down on one knee to ask for Robin?s hand in marriage. By the time she says, ?Yes? and they embrace for a kiss, the first verse of ?Let Your Heart Hold Fast? is under way.
For fans of CBS? ?How I Met Your Mother,? the engagement of two of the show?s lead characters was a momentous occasion. It was just as important to Fort Atlantic, the band whose star rose after its song was used in the scene.
?We had almost 400,000 views and 15,000 downloads of the track in the week following,? said Paul Roper, president of the band?s Nashville-based label, Dualtone Records. ?We didn?t have a ton going on before that placement. Now we have a story we?re going to take and tell to the rest of the industry, especially radio.?
This strategy of placing musical works on television shows and in motion pictures, commercials and video games is becoming an ever more important tool for record labels, artists, songwriters and music publishers grappling with how to make money on a product that customers have become less willing to buy.
?It?s a great revenue driver and that?s one of the reasons it?s become so popular for publishers and labels and artists,? Roper said. ?It can really shine a light on a developing artist and on a key song.?
Commercials for cars, big-budget love stories and television shows like ABC?s ?Nashville? provide opportunities for Nashville artists, songwriters, labels and publishers to squeeze new dollars from the sluggish market for music by selling what are known as ?synchronization rights,? sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars per use.
Nashville and Buddy Miller picked up synchronization rights from the ABC show ?Nashville.? (photo: Samuel M. Simpkins / File / The Tennessean)
?It is the one area that is growing and you actually have a little bit of control over your destiny,? said Kent Earls, executive vice president and general manager of Universal Music Publishing Group. ?The decline of CD sales ? I can?t do anything about that. But actively pitching our music for synchronization use, we make it a priority here. It?s a big priority for us.?
Total sales rise
Overall music sales, which include albums and singles in digital and physical formats, climbed 3.1 percent to 1.66 billion units in 2012 from 1.61 billion in 2011. The growth was buoyed by sales of digital singles, according to the Nielsen Co. & Billboard?s 2012 Music Industry Report. Meanwhile, fewer people bought albums, the more expensive product. Those sales fell 4.4 percent.
That dynamic sets the stage for investment in synchronization. It is difficult to track the rise or fall in sync licensing, because unlike mechanical and performance rights, there are no pre-established rates for synchronization rights. They are, instead, negotiated on an individual basis between the music publisher and the visual production company, in most cases.
Synchronization is not a new area for the music industry. But it has expanded in the past decade as the once hard line between musicians, writers and composers who work exclusively for television and those who don?t has rapidly eroded.
?We?ve gradually started to move towards music directors really looking out for outside songs and songs from other categories,? said Karl Braun, a partner with the Nashville office of Hall Booth Smith PC. ?Now, the music directors for these shows are priding themselves on going out and finding interesting and independent music to sync with these shows to really give the shows their own identity and uniqueness.?
There is dual benefit in selling synchronization rights for recording artists, record labels and music creators and publishers. First, the one-time payment for use provides an easy revenue source. But connecting a song with a visual product also has the potential to drive interest to both known and unknown artists and increase sales of their music.
Grammy-nominated band The Lumineers didn?t have any music for sale when its song ?Ho Hey? appeared in an episode of CW?s ?Hart of Dixie? last year. That didn?t stop fans from trying to buy the song.
?It really created this frenzy of activity online as people were clamoring for a place they could find the song,? Roper said. ?The only thing available was a live performance of the band performing a house show. The social media views shot up to a couple hundred thousand. That was a great indicator for us that we had something special here.?
?What we saw was that people were almost rabid about trying to find this song,? Roper said. ?It was a great building block for us to use as a catalyst.?
New revenue source
Even old songs are finding a place in the synched world. Publishers are particularly opening their song catalogs to advertisers. A Volkswagen commercial featuring Johnny Cash?s ?Dirty Old Egg Suckin? Dog? was a ?really big earner? for Universal, Earls said.
?Big-budget movies is what you shoot for,? said Earls, whose company recently has placed a Keith Urban song in a major motion picture. ?TV shows pay pretty good, but not nearly as much as a big budget movie and advertising.?
Such familiar songs can command six-figure payments in major advertising campaigns, Braun said.
With so much cash on the line, artists are vigilant about protecting their music from misuse. Nashville rock band The Black Keys, for instance, has sued The Home Depot, Pizza Hut and Pinnacle Entertainment for using its songs in advertisements for their products.
Nashville artists in particular have recently found success selling their rights for commercial, television and film use, Braun said. Historically country music hadn?t been considered sync-friendly, Earls said.
?This used to be a Los Angeles phenomenon. The sync world was pretty much concentrated in L.A.,? Braun said. ?But so many writers are coming to Nashville from L.A. now, that the word has gotten out and it has become a Nashville thing.?
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