Licensing famous music
A song that your audience already knows can give your advert instant recognition. Getting permission to use one takes patience and know-how, and that’s where we come in.
Why use a famous track?
A well-known song arrives with years of feeling already attached to it. People know the words, they remember where they were when they first heard it, and within a couple of seconds your advert has their attention.
That’s a powerful thing to borrow, and it can make a brand feel bigger and more established overnight. It’s one of the reasons the adverts people remember so often have a famous song in them.
Every song comes with two sets of rights
This is the bit that catches most people out. When you want to use a famous song, you’re actually dealing with two separate things, and they’re usually owned by different people.
- The song itself. That means the tune and the words, as they were written. These are known as the publishing rights, and they belong to the songwriters and their music publishers. Permission to use the song in an advert is called a synchronisation licence, or sync licence for short.
- The recording. That means the particular version you know, performed by a particular artist. These are known as the master rights, and they usually belong to the record label. Permission to use the recording is called a master use licence.
To use the original recording of a famous song, you need both, and each has to be negotiated separately.
Why it can take a while
We’ll be honest that licensing a famous track can be a complicated process, and it can be drawn out.
A song with four writers might have four different publishers, and every one of them has to say yes. Some will come back within days, and others can take weeks. Some artists and writers want to approve the advert itself, or have views on the kinds of products they’re happy to be associated with. And sometimes the answer is simply no, however good the offer.
That’s why we start these conversations as early as possible, and why we’d always suggest having a second choice in mind.
Most favoured nations
You’ll hear this phrase a lot in music licensing, usually shortened to MFN. It means that every rights holder gets terms at least as good as anybody else’s on the same deal.
So if the publisher agrees a fee and the record label then negotiates a higher one, the publisher’s fee goes up to match. The same applies between several publishers who share a song. In practice it means the most expensive party sets the price for everyone, so it’s something we plan for from the start.
Re-recording the song
Sometimes the original recording is too expensive, or the label says no. In that case there’s another route, which is to make a new recording of the song. In the industry this is called a re-record.
A re-record means you don’t need the master use licence, because you’re not using the original recording. But you do still need the sync licence for the song itself, because the tune and the words still belong to the writers and publishers.
We can produce a version that’s close in feel to the original, or one that takes the song somewhere new, such as a stripped-back piano version of something upbeat. It does have to be an honest new version, though. Deliberately imitating a famous singer’s voice so that people think it’s them can land you in legal trouble, so that’s a line we won’t cross.
Changing the words
Some clients want their name sung in place of a word in the song, or a line changed to fit the offer. That can be done, but it isn’t something you can simply go ahead with.
Any change to the lyrics has to be agreed with the publishers, and often with the writers personally. Some are relaxed about it, some will charge more, and some won’t allow it at all. We’ll ask the question as part of the first approach, so that you know where you stand before any money is committed.
What it costs
It isn’t cheap, and as a guide, for a regional campaign you should expect to pay from the mid five figures for a moderately well-known track. For one that everybody knows, it can run well into six figures, or more.
The price depends on where in the country the advert will be shown, which channels and stations it will run on, including whether you want to use it on radio too, and how long you want it for. You also need to think about whether the advert will run online or on social media, because that can affect the price as well.
There may be limits on how much airtime the licence covers, too. Some licences are capped at a certain number of TVRs, which is the way TV audiences are counted, so a bigger campaign can mean a bigger fee.
You can negotiate a longer term at the outset, and it’s often offered at a discount. That’s worth thinking about carefully, because we know from experience that if you use a track and then go back to license it again, the price often goes up. Once a song is working for you, the people who own it know that too.
What we can say is that it can work wonders. The right song can do the job of a much bigger campaign, and people will carry on associating it with you long after the advert has stopped running.
If the numbers don’t add up, there are other ways to get a similar effect. Custom music written for your brand gives you something that’s yours alone, and a well-known face or voice can bring the same kind of instant recognition.
What we handle
You don’t need to learn any of this, and you don’t need to arrive with a song in mind. We’ll work with you to find a track that suits your brand, your audience and your budget, and then we’ll take it from there.
- Suggesting tracks that fit, and finding out who owns the song and the recording
- Approaching the publishers and the label
- Negotiating the fees, the territory and the length of the licence
- Getting approval for any changes to the words
- Producing a re-record if that’s the better route
- Making sure the paperwork is in place before the advert goes to Clearcast
For bigger deals, or where the contracts are complex, we’d recommend having a music lawyer look over the agreement as well.
It all starts with a sensible budget
If this is an avenue you’d like to explore, tell us roughly what you have to spend and where the advert will run, and we’ll work with you to find a track that fits.