A track can carry a film, move a record to number one and date a campaign inside a quarter. What sync and master licences actually cover, roughly what they cost, and where brands get burned.
In March 1999 a track with no vocals, no chorus and no artist anyone could name went to number one in the UK. Mr Oizo’s “Flat Beat” got there because Levi’s had spent the previous two months running it under a yellow puppet on national television. The record followed the advert, not the other way round. That is the clearest statement anyone has made about music in advertising: the track and the film are one asset, and the order in which the public meets them barely matters.
Music is also the line item most likely to blow a production budget late, and the one most likely to be decided by whoever shouts loudest in the edit. This is a guide to what music actually does in an advert, what the two licences you are buying really are, roughly what they cost, and the specific ways a track can turn on you.
A soundtrack does three jobs, and only one of them is mood. The first is pacing: music tells the viewer how fast the film is moving and when it has finished, which is why so many thirty-second edits are cut to a musical bar rather than a story beat. The second is emotional shorthand, which buys you feeling you have not had time to earn in the script.
The third job is the valuable one and the one most often wasted. A recurring piece of music becomes a distinctive brand asset, recognisable in three seconds with the screen off. Hamlet cigars understood this from 1966, when Collett Dickenson Pearce put Jacques Loussier’s jazz reading of Bach’s Air on the G String under every failure and every consoling cigar. The music ran until the UK banned tobacco advertising on television in 1991, then returned in cinemas until 1999, and it still triggers the brand in anyone who was watching.
Stella Artois did the same thing in the other direction. The Lowe Howard-Spink films that ran from 1991 to 2001 used a leitmotif taken from Jean-Claude Petit’s score for Jean de Florette, itself built on the overture to Verdi’s La forza del destino. Two brands, twenty-five years apart, both chose a piece of music old enough that it could not date.
A recorded song is two separate pieces of property. The composition, meaning the melody and lyrics, is controlled by the songwriters and their publisher. The recording, meaning the specific performance you can hear, is controlled by the artist and their label. Using a famous record in an advert means clearing both, from two sets of people who do not have to agree with each other.
The synchronisation licence covers the composition. The master use licence covers the recording. Where the two sides are held separately, the fee is commonly split roughly evenly between them, which means a negotiation that fails on either side kills the whole thing. None of this is covered by the blanket PRS or PPL licences that cover music in a shop or on a radio station: advertising sync is negotiated deal by deal, and there is no rate card.
A re-record, sometimes called a cover, replaces the second licence with a new recording you commission. It removes the master fee entirely. It never removes the publishing fee, because you are still using someone else’s song.
Four variables set the price: term, territory, media and exclusivity. A six-month UK television and online licence for a mid-level catalogue track is a different order of expense from a two-year worldwide all-media licence with a category exclusive attached, and the industry rule of thumb is that exclusivity alone can multiply a fee several times over.
Published licensing guides put a national television campaign somewhere between roughly £10,000 and £100,000 for a track that is known but not iconic, with major-label hits in national campaigns routinely clearing far above that. Treat those as brackets rather than quotes. The only figures worth trusting are the ones a rights holder has actually put in writing for your specific term and territory.
The famous outlier is instructive. Microsoft used the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” to launch Windows 95, and the fee was rumoured in the British press at anywhere between eight and fourteen million dollars. Retired Microsoft chief operating officer Bob Herbold later put the real number at three million. Inflated sync fees are a genre of press release, and planners should treat reported figures accordingly.
The re-record is the most useful tool in the box, and John Lewis built a decade of Christmas advertising on it. Lily Allen’s slow cover of Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know” for the 2013 film went to number one in the UK, which is a return no master licence could have bought. Note what the brand actually gained: a recording it had commissioned, in a treatment nobody else owned, from a song the audience already knew.
There is a hard limit on this. You may re-record a song you have licensed. You may not hire someone to imitate a specific artist’s voice in order to avoid paying that artist, which is where two American cases still set the boundary. In 1988 the Ninth Circuit found for Bette Midler against Ford and Young & Rubicam after a Mercury Sable campaign used a soundalike performing “Do You Want to Dance” when Midler had declined.
Four years later Tom Waits went further. A Frito-Lay Doritos jingle built on his song “Step Right Up” and voiced by a professional Waits impersonator produced a jury award of $375,000 in compensatory and $2m in punitive damages for voice misappropriation, affirmed on appeal in 1992. If the reason you are casting a session singer is that they sound like the artist you could not afford, stop.
Boots ran a two-minute Christmas film in November 2007 in which office workers get ready for a party. Mother’s script does very little. The work is done by Ernie K-Doe’s 1970 recording of “Here Come the Girls”, a horn arrangement that turns a queue for the mirror into a march, and the film took a D&AD pencil in 2008. Boots then owned that record in the UK for years.
Levi’s spent the 1990s doing this on purpose, and the ads we still argue about are on the archive: see our verdict on Levi’s Launderette and on Cadbury’s Gorilla, both of which are cases of a brand renting a record’s existing emotional meaning rather than writing its own.
The evidence that an advert can move a record is unusually clean. Stiltskin’s “Inside”, written by Peter Lawlor for the Levi’s film “Creek”, went to number one in 1994. Babylon Zoo’s “Spaceman” entered at number one on 21 January 1996 after a Levi’s spot the previous December, sold 383,000 copies in its first week and became the fastest-selling debut single in British chart history.
Then Flat Eric, a puppet built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop for Bartle Bogle Hegarty in January 1999, took the same trick to its logical end. Quentin Dupieux directed the films and wrote the music as Mr Oizo, and “Flat Beat” topped the charts in the UK, Germany and Italy. Shaggy’s “Boombastic” and Stiltskin before it had already made the pattern obvious: for most of that decade, a Levi’s placement was worth more to a record than radio.
None of that is a marketing objective. A chart position tells you the music was memorable; it does not tell you the brand was. Boots’ record only re-entered the UK chart at number 43 and the campaign was still a success, because the brand, not the song, was what people remembered.
A contemporary hit stamps a date on your film that no amount of grading will remove. Licence the record of the moment and you have bought a campaign with a shelf life measured in quarters, because the moment it stops being current it starts sounding like the year it came from. Catalogue music and commissioned scores do not have this problem, which is why Hamlet’s Bach and Stella’s Verdi were still working decades in.
There are two further failure modes. The first is meaning drift: you licence a song for its chorus and inherit its verses, and audiences who know the record will notice. The second is the artist. A person can say something next year that makes your asset unusable, and unlike a piece of music you commissioned, you do not own the way out.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
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