Are most of the big agencies using music producers these days? We just started as our agency was bought by a bigger agency and I just find they do a lot of cattle calling, instead of allowing collaboration between the my team and the music house. I don’t find it to be the most effective way to find the right piece of music but we’re kind of forced to work through them now…

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What do you mean when you say cattle calling? Does your team not get any face time with the music house?

I worked with music producers in the past at big agencies, and I generally find that they are good to work with and they locate great tracks that can be used for our budgets.

The pitfall I usually find is when your creative has difficulty articulating what they want in a track or if they are not musically inclined. When that happens, I tend to go through many rounds of music reviews.

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They can be gold to your project. Not only being able to interpret a brief, but also bringing relationships with music publishers you may not have. Plus the good ones can get their hands on unreleased tracks that can elevate a project with fresh, ahead of the curve vibes. That’s when they are good ones.

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I do agree, they can help, and save the producer running the project time, but they seem so far out of the project loop sometimes and tend to leave the music houses in the dark with minimal information. I have a good friend that’s on the music house side that gets called on often and then left completely in the dark without anything but the one brief email asking for music, and then maybe an update reply, after she asks, that their track was not chosen… but often there’s just no word back at all.

Cattle calling = calling on 4+ music houses to pull together tracks by sending one email to all with at most a paragraph for a brief and not allowing for the music house to talk with the team and really get a sense for what they want. It’s happening more and more and we eventually find something but we lose all the collaboration and I don’t have the relationship with the music house that I used to.

I understand that frustration. Sounds like they are either overloaded or not giving you the attention needed to do better work for your project. Is there another person up the chain you can speak to? Or express this to someone within the larger agency if the music producer is not able or willing to hear you out? Not sure what steps you can take to remedy this, or what you’ve done already.

I usually have my creatives speak with the music producer, then they provide a written brief and use that knowledge to speak to the right music houses to get tracks. If they land on the music house that hit the brief best we usually have a creative convo with the music house about another pull of tracks or honing in on tweaking their favorite track to fit what they want if it’s close.

I totally agree with the anti-cattle call sentiment here. The wide-net music “pull” is such an inefficient way to go about it. As a music producer on the vendor side, I would rather demo for free with proper visuals and interaction with the creatives than pull and tweak dozens of tracks based on a vague “what do you have like this?” brief. That said, I think agency music producers are great.

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