Successful Musicians Podcast – Episode #50: Chris SD and the Ultimate Music Supervisor Panel

Successful Musicians Podcast Episode 50

Interviewer: Jason Tonioli

Hey, this is Jason Tonioli. I’m a piano player that grew up believing it wasn’t possible to earn a living and support a family with music. I’ve proven that idea was wrong and I’ve met hundreds of other people who have found success with their music. This podcast features stories of musicians who have found their own personal version of success and fulfillment in both music and life. This podcast is meant to inspire musicians and help them believe in their abilities and motivate them to share their talents with others. This is the Successful Musicians Podcast.

Jason: Welcome to the podcast. Today, our special guest is my friend, Chris SD, who last time I saw you, we were in Costa Rica, and you were learning to roll a kayak on Class III River Rapids, which was amazing. I’m excited to have you here. The reason I wanted to bring you back on the show, Chris, is because once a year you have a thing where you teach people how to do sync licensing for music. I think this is one of those topics that a lot of musicians see or they’ve heard of, or they see the opportunities that have been out there with more TV shows and movies but honestly, most people have no idea how that world works, and it seems that there’s just this small group of people that… At least that’s probably the observation for the normal musician, that there’s this secret society maybe you got to be in to be able to get projects like the Hans Zimmer of the world where they just seem to get all the cool stuff and keep doing cool music. That’s not the case because I went through your course, and I wanted to share that with people. Welcome to the show.

Chris SD: Yeah, thanks so much, Jason. I really appreciate you having me as always. Yes, Costa Rica was fantastic and had an amazing time down there for sure.

Jason: I know you were an artist, and you had a studio and you’ve played music a lot. You’ve had a lot of really great successes for yourself as a career but a handful of years ago, you transitioned into thinking, “I’ve got these connections. I want to help people.” Talk a little bit about that so people can know who you are and what you’re doing now.

Chris SD: Yeah, of course. So basically, long story short, I was a music producer. I was in a band before that and then wanted to discover the magic of music production. What’s this dark art that everybody does so well in the studio? How does it work? What does all those buttons mean? Everything. Got into music production, basically became an engineer, and then worked my way up as a producer. I had the good fortune of winning some awards. This was up in Canada where I started. I basically got a fancy green card to come down to L. A. and do the same thing. One of the things that kept it like this other side of recording was how do you help the artist, the ones I was working on in the studio, and how do you help their music get out there. I used to work with major label artists as well, and they have the managers and the agents and everything, propelling them along. That’s not a big deal. They didn’t have a problem with getting their music out there. They had publicists and all that stuff.

The indie artists that I used to work with were just as good musically, but they didn’t have the infrastructure, they didn’t have the people pushing their music out into the world. The question then became, for me, a little bit selfish, honestly, because it was like, how do I get music out into the world that I’ve put my blood, sweat, and tears into as well? I worked really hard on those records, often for a low budget because it’s indie. I did it for the love of doing that, and I’ve always supported indie music. I just think that without indie music, we have no music because it all comes from a beginning somewhere. I wanted to get involved in that grassroots where things were starting out. There’s a number of avenues. You can’t wait to get a label deal. You can try to build a fan base.

Back in the day, it was putting posters on polls and touring. Nowadays, it’s building your social media and trying to get your music out on Spotify and things like that, different strategies for doing that. I saw early on, just as it was catching on, that bands were getting their music into TV and film, and they were having massive success. Some unknown band would get one commercial. You could probably remember the early iPod commercials. If you got a song into that, you were an instant international star. That’s just what happened. It broke so many artists and stuff like that. There are so many avenues. If you get yourself on a TV show and you can be in front of millions of eyes and ears, people are shazaming you, trying to find out who you are. You also get potentially paid thousands of dollars with a sync fee. You make money as a fee immediately off the top. Then you get back in royalties coming in, and every time that show airs, for example. It can be really lucrative as well but what really interested me most was the fact that it was like a rocket. It really was able to change things so quickly for a band or an artist. They didn’t have to work a long time at it. What I did know is it was very hard to get your music into TV and film. Even back then, when it was easier, it was still hard. The reason it was easier back then was because up until a certain point, they used just composers. Then they started trying to use popular music instead of just composer music.

Ultimately, when they were starting to get into this using music, it was usually from publishers and labels and things like that. There was this stigma with a lot of, especially TV, where people… It was not cool to get your song into a show or something like that because it was cable TV. They just made shows for the masses, and there weren’t that many productions that musicians wanted to be in.

With the advent of streaming, with the advent of all the stuff that’s happened, the sync industry has grown incredibly huge. I mean, if you think back to even the heavy cable days when you had like, wow, you can get almost 1,000 channels on cable. Now they’ve got streaming, they’ve got YouTubes doing stuff, they’ve got Vimeo movies, they’ve got indie films, they’ve got all kinds of stuff. The movie studio is going straight to streaming. There are all of these opportunities now for people to get their music out there. I clued in and I thought,

Wait, why am I not dedicating more time to helping indie musicians get their music into TV and film? This just sounds like a perfect vehicle. I smugly thought I was going to go to some music supervisors because I had a name in the industry being an award winning producer, I thought this would be easy. I’m just going to walk up to them, tell them who I am, and they’re just going to say, Great, Chris, we want to work with you because we like working with people who are in the industry and doing what you do and all that. It was not that easy. It’s a totally different industry. It’s really the music that matters and to get in contact with them to know how to get your music in front of them, it’s about relationships. It’s not just so much a one-off. You’re not going to call them up and say, hey, I’ve got this great song, there’s an investment for them in doing that. They’ve got to trust you for one, which is hard for them to trust in Indie musicians because they don’t know that you know how it works.

One example can be like, you write a song, you put it out, then you’re getting accepted by a music supervisor. It goes into the spotting session. The showrunners, producers and director are like, Awesome, this is great, and then it’s going to be released. Then when somebody who played on your record comes out of the woodwork and says, whoa, I own half of this song because I did this and there was no contract signed or whatever or who knows what, that is a nightmare for supervisors. They tend to want to go through filters. They want to go through things like libraries, agents, music libraries, music agents, licensing agents, and publishers and labels and entities they know are going to filter this stuff through.

At this very beginning when I was trying to get into it, I realized it was a relationship business. I started developing those relationships. I started going to everything I was invited to. I started to get to know them better, always having high-quality music available for them. Over time, they started to trust that I was a good filter. They started to know my first name basis as the name spread. Some of the bands I worked with get their music into shows, movies, and ads. That’s where the whole thing started to take off. Then as that success grew, I thought, why am I only doing this for the artists that I’m working with in the studio? I should be doing this for more indie artists if I could, but I was really busy as a producer. That quick little story, coincided with the birth of my daughter, and I realized I didn’t want to be sitting in studios for 12-14 hours a day anymore.

Jason: You don’t want to be working until 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning doing…

Chris SD: Yeah, I didn’t want to miss out on her growing up. I decided what I should do is move everything online and start focusing on sync with all these relationships that I had. Why should the labels get all the syncs? Why can’t indie artists who I love, why can’t they get their music and the TV and film? I started dedicating my life to doing that, and that’s how that happened. I started Sync Songwriter, and here we are today.

Jason: Well, having been through your course, I think one of the things that if you think it makes total sense, but there’s so many of these new shows coming. Netflix is producing shows and Disney Plus. Every network and Peacock TV, it used to just be the networks that were doing these things, and now it’s almost like every one of them is trying to do a full suite of stuff just to keep people on their subscription service. A lot of these shows, I think what was interesting is they’re not really looking for the big-name band for most of the shows. They’re not going to go pay a Taylor Swift type of to be able to have it on their little Netflix movie or whatever. It just makes sense that, Oh, my gosh, these Indie artists sound similar. It might actually be a cooler vibe in a lot of those shows that are actually happening too. I’m sure you find that with these music supervisors, if they’re looking for stuff, they don’t want just the mainstream thing that everybody’s heard of, right?

Chris SD: Well, they do because it’ll attract ears. They would love to be able to get Taylor Swift and they’d be able to love to get Billie Eilish and all these top artists. Sure, they love that. To your point, though, they also want things people haven’t heard before, but that sound is good. There’s definitely that draw for that. The first reason is the big one, why indie music is so successful now in TV and film is because of the budget. They don’t have to pay any musicians what they have to pay a superstar. They’re paying maybe a 10th or a 20th of what they’d have to pay an artist. For an Indie artist, that still adds up to 2,000, 5,000, $10,000 for one sync placement. I’ve gotten artists $30,000, $20,000, $10,000. That’s not a chunk change. That’s some serious stuff. It really comes down to the budget. To go off a little bit on what you were saying about looking for other kinds of music.

I have a music supervisor friend, where she went all the way to, I think it was South Dakota, and she was after a band. She couldn’t find it… She heard the song, it was on something, and they didn’t have a website, and there was no way to contact them. She couldn’t find them, whatever. She actually went out there to a festival they were playing at to meet them and told them she loved their tracks, loved their music and wanted to use them. Was that okay? Can we sign a contract? They’re like, Yeah, that’d be great. She put 10 of their songs in one show, a number of episodes and stuff like that. That is the power of that individuality like you were talking about. It’s that finding that original, that diamond in the rough that no one else has. Another thing they say is we don’t always want to go to libraries because there’s a lot of production writers and libraries. People use the same songs. They don’t want to use the same songs someone else has access to. They want to discover their own music.

Jason: Give it its own flavor. One of the other things I remember when I was going through the course that I think is just simple, but most musicians who are doing production at their own home don’t realize the importance of metadata and just tagging your track with some key pieces of information so that when that music supervisor gets it, it has… Okay, here’s how to contact the band even, or it’s got the cover art on it. There are just some simple things and there’s some really great tools now I know that help people do that. Do you see that as the number one? Is that the way music supervisors can tell, Okay, this guy knows what they’re doing. This guy has no clue because missing metadata, right?

Chris SD: Well, that’s one. Yeah, that’s one thing. Just to clarify so people know what the metadata is and why that’s important, is because 13:14 essentially metadata is something that you embed in your track. You embed it in an MP3. Mp3s are the currency of the sync world. You basically send MP3s around, and that’s because they’re easy, the file sizes are small, and the compression algorithms are really good, and they sound really close to waves and stuff like that. When you’re first trying to get your music out there, you’re using MP3s and you’re sending that to whoever you’re trying to get their attention. You need to have metadata in that file embedded in there that tells them obviously the name of the song, that’s the first thing, and then a bunch of things about it, who you are, the tempo, you might put your lyrics in there. There’s a bunch of things actually that you can put in there. Actually, it just occurred to me. We have an awesome cheat sheet on metadata. Literally, it tells you everything you need to know about putting it in there. It’s not complicated. It’s like, do this, do this, do this, do this, and you’re golden. If you want to, I know we didn’t talk about this before, but I’m happy to give you a link if you want to-.

Jason: For sure. Let’s put that in the show notes for sure. That would be awesome. I mean, it’s just such a good resource. I know as I’ve learned more about metadata and just how the process works, it’s been fun to watch the track stage, the software develops. Scott and Robina have put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into that software. It’s really fun now to see how that’s progressed. I think that’s really starting to catch on in a lot of musicians to make that easier, right?

Chris SD: Yeah, exactly. That’s one facet of what that software does, which is great. The metadata is so critical to doing that. You can do it on a number of platforms. Or TrackStage is an excellent platform to be doing that, and it’s my go to these days. Ultimately, the metadata, what has happened in the past is people forget to put the metadata or don’t put even their contact info in, and a supervisor will get the track, love it, and maybe file it because they can’t use it right away. They put it in their own filing system, put five stars beside it, whatever they do. Then a month later, pull it up and say, I remember this one, I want to use this and then there’s no contact information. They don’t know who you are or how to get a hold of you, and they’re not going to go back digging in an email inbox for you. They’re like, oh, well, and they move on.

You definitely want to get your metadata right but really, where the supervisors know that you know what you’re doing is you need to understand how it works at a basic level. You don’t need a law degree, but you need to know what 200% means in one stop, and you need to understand how publishing works. Basically, another huge part of it is being responsive and being nice to normal human beings. These music supervisors who are very limited on bandwidth, so you need to know how to do that stuff.

Jason: I know coming up in January, you’re going to be doing a panel of supervisors, right? This is just a free thing to introduce and try and just add some value. Talk a little bit about that.

Chris SD: Basically, when I was coming up through this licensing journey and learning so much about it and meeting the supervisors, I learned about music libraries and licensing agents. Then it was like, well, why do I need to meet music supervisors when I can just tell my indie artists to just join a music library or just jump, try to get an agent. I thought, they’ll do the work for you so, anybody who doesn’t know what they do is you take your song and put it in a music library, basically sits in the music library and it’s a searchable database that a music supervisor can go to and find you based on some parameters. They can just type in like jar and this and that, and then a whole bunch of songs come up and they may pick yours. Or a licensing agent is the same thing, except they’re more proactive. They’re usually out there pitching your music for you and going after their contacts and trying to get your music placed. Now, they both take a cut of your money and it’s sizable. It’s grown over the years, and they take at least half these days. Plus, they take publishing often, so they take a big chunk of your music in most cases.

Here’s the biggest problem with that. The biggest problem is that everybody and their dog these days has a record out, and a sizable portion of those people have caught on to this licensing thing because it’s so huge. Music supervisors have become the new ANR, essentially. People are trying to put their music out in all these libraries. You go to a library, they have millions, millions of tracks in there. You’re essentially playing a lottery. If you think about it this way, a music supervisor goes to the library, it’s like a box store, and you’re like one can on one shelf in a department in a section somewhere. They’re going to walk all the way in there and make their way back and somehow find you, at least all the other cans that are beside you. It’s like playing the lottery. I realized that was not a way to get success. It was about going straight to the source. The very people who put music in the TV and film are the music supervisors. You get in with them and you get good relationships with them because they only have a limited number of go-to people. You become that go-to person. That’s how you get consistent sync placements and more lucrative ones is giving them what they want when they want it, and they trust you.

I took that route with music supervisors and decided what I wanted to do in January is we have a free panel, sync-songwriter-music-supervisor panel. I invite a group of top music supervisors. These are not just any music supervisors. These work on the top shows, movies, and ads, invite them out to this free panel. You can jump on. It’s just online, it’s virtual. You can jump on, you can show up, and you get to hear and learn about these music supervisors, who they are, what they look for, why any music gets into TV and film, and you can discover literally what they’re after so that you can start thinking like, Do I have music for music supervisors? You get a window into how they think and what makes them tick, and it’s awesome and it’s completely free. We usually have thousands of musicians show up for this thing every year.

Jason: I know I shared that out last year with people, and it’s just a cool thing to be able to share with people. Most of the time you’d expect, oh, I got to pay money to go to this conference or this course or whatever in order to get it. Of course, there’s going to be for those that want to go deeper, you’ve got all kinds of resources, but I think you’ve done a really good job over delivering on that front end just to help people figure out if it’s right for them. If the timing is right, I think that’s the other thing is for a lot of musicians, being at the right time is an important thing, and at least giving people the opportunity to say, you know what? Yes, I want to do this and commit to learning that stuff. It’s definitely something that I know has been helpful to me, and I know it’s been helpful to several people I know as well.

Chris SD: Amazing. Yeah. Normally, like you said, you’d have to fly to L. A. and pay for hotel and food and then pay the conference pass and then go and watch some supervisors on a stage. I thought, hey, you know what? How better to help Indie musicians then bring that to them and so on? It’s a huge extravaganza. It’s the biggest sync event of the year so far. We’ve definitely had the most attendance out of anything online. We’re super looking forward to that.

Jason: For anybody that is, I think, interested in going deeper, I’m sure you’ll have more information after that course. I remember what I was going through, and I’m assuming you’re still doing this, but you would actually as an artist, I submitted music to be able to be listened to. Then there was an actual music supervisor, and you got to pick which one you wanted to hear your music, but they would come on for an hour or so and listen and just give feedback on every artist’s stuff. It was just interesting to be able to hear a fly on the wall and essentially get in the head of somebody of what’s going through their mind when they hear that track and they’re like, oh, I like this because of this thing. A lot of those were totally different styles than what I was sharing or doing myself, but it was just interesting to hear, oh, they liked this because of that thing. Then as an artist, be able to go back and at least have that thought process to know what might be useful to that supervisor if I’m doing music specifically for that purpose.

Chris SD: Yes, exactly. It’s important to remember that almost any song can get into TV and film. There’s a place for it because there’s so many kinds of shows and movies. I know people get meditation music into TV and film, all kinds of esoteric styles. Almost no matter what you write, there’s a home for it. One of the things I do is show people how to find the homes instead of throwing them against the wall. Shotgun approach, it doesn’t work, but how to actually find the shows and the supervisors that it works with. The main thing I do is I connect indie artists with music supervisors. I’m like a connector. I certainly can’t work with everybody who comes to the SyncSongwriter community, but every year I work with a group of people and I put them actually in front live in front of music supervisors so they can literally meet them one on one, connect with them, and that’s where the magic happens. That’s how come we have so many sync placements? We have such a success rate here.

Jason: The other thing, and this is just feedback too, for a course when I went through it, a lot of the courses that seem to be out there, you feel like you get so much hitting you all at the same time, it’s like hitting you with a firehose. I think what I liked with yours is you gave a week or two sometimes to go through maybe an hour or maybe even 30 minutes, but then you’d have an assignment. Even if I was busy, it wasn’t like it was a big deal to pound through the material and then apply it and then come to the next one. It’s one of those where I liked how you spread it out over enough time so that it wasn’t too much all at the same time. I know you don’t even do this. You’re just doing this once a year. It’s not like you do this multiple times a year, right?

Chris SD: Yeah, just once a year. For me, the learning part is that learning is fun, but sometimes it takes work and stuff. I’m more about results. I’m a results person, not just like a how-to all the time. I’m like, Okay, that’s great. How do we actually make things happen? I’m much more focused on that. I do teach the Indie artists before I introduce them to the supervisors, but only so that they know what they’re doing when they get there. They don’t shoot themselves in the foot. That’s literally why I do it. I’m not selling a course, really. It’s just one, if you imagine, like the runway. You’ve got to go down the runway to pick up speed to take off. That’s all that is. I teach only what you need to know. Not everything you need to know, you’re going to learn, but nothing more. It’s not like a crazy course you’ve got to go through and all these modules and everything like that. It’s just to teach you everything you need to know, so that would actually introduce you to the supervisors at the end that you are ready for them. That’s basically it.

Jason: Well, being introduced to those supervisors is super valuable. The other thing that sticks with me is you essentially are teaching how to track down and find the right supervisors and be strategic. Like my music, I’m a piano player. I’m not going to go try and get my piano music into some country like Yellowstone or some of these others that just… It might just be a wrong fit. You taught how to specifically figure out what people are working on and then how to probably track that person down and be personal without being creepy and annoying to them necessarily, right?

Chris SD: Totally. No, that’s exactly it. There’s a lot of things that you need to know about how to approach them and what the moors are and the things that work, the culture around sync and understanding that. That’s something we dive deep into. I even have email templates and everything that works and all this other stuff.

Jason: Well, Chris, I know we’re short on time, but if people want to go find out more about your stuff, whether it’s even maybe six months from now and they’re just listening to this, even though this might be passed, where should they go to find out more about what you’re doing?

Chris SD: They can go to our website, syncsongwriter.com. That’s a central place to do that. Otherwise, in the show notes, there’ll be a link to be able to register for the songwriter panel, sorry, the music supervisor panel. Remember, the SyncSongwriter Music… That’s so many words here. Hang on. Syncsongwriter, music supervisor panel, remember that it’s totally free. You’re just literally signing up. We know where to send the emails so that you know how to get there. That is the biggest thing that you can do for your career this year is just show up to that panel to learn about what music supervisors are looking for and those specific supervisors, what songs are looking for right now.

Jason: I can just throw my endorsement out of it. It was definitely worth my time and effort to… I went into more of the deeper side, invested in that education, and it was worth it. It was just one of those things I don’t know that you get it from… That you could even find it at most colleges. It’s more of those you’re learning boots on the ground by somebody who’s actually played in the right sandbox to do that with their music. We’ll also put the link in there for that metadata checklist that you have too.

Thank you so much for taking some time and sharing with our guests or those that are listening. Hopefully, this is valuable for you guys, and we’ll definitely catch you on the next one, I guess. We’ll be down in Costa Rica one of these days together again, kayaking.

Chris SD: We sure will. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me today, Jason. This was great.

Jason: Awesome. Thanks so much.

Chris SD: Yeah. See you later. Bye.

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