The Monopolization of the Film Music Industry

I was writing a lot already about how the film music industry has changed over the last two decades and also how film music as a genre has changed. Many of these developments are inter dependent or follow the trend of the media industry in general. And while the topic I want to cover today is no exception from this it nevertheless is a notable development that has a considerable impact on the way how composer careers are working nowadays.

Until maybe twenty years ago if as a composer you didn’t have any more capacities to take on another project you would in most cases say “Sorry, I’m fully booked, I can’t do it, maybe ask my colleague X or Y or Z”. Today you would in most cases say “Sure, I can do it” and then subcontract it to someone else, maybe work on some parts of the music, or maybe develop the musical concept or maybe even only do some admin work on the project. And this of course seems to make sense, you can add the project to your portfolio, you will make the client happy who asked “you” to do the score so on the next project they will possibly ask you again and you make money by potentially subcontracting most of the work and still keep a cut of the money to yourself.

This phenomenon is wide spread in the industry and while there are some huge names who are attached to such a business model, also in the lower tiers of the industry this happens a lot, potentially even more. There are many composers who pursue the business model of attaching their name to as many projects as possible as quickly as possible in order to increase the potential to be part of a project that drags them up the career ladder.

So from a business side, this all makes a lot of sense and it is the approach that many branches of the “creative industry” nowadays take. In a way the composer’s name becomes a brand name under which a sometimes large team of assistants and helpers do the majority of work while the “lead composer” spends time with coming up with concepts, themes or even do admin work most of the time.

One of the big pro arguments that we keep hearing for such business models and which recently have been reproduced many times when talking about Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control is that such arrangements give up and coming composers the opportunity to enter the business and be mentored by the experienced composer to eventually make it on their own. And of course, there is some truth to it. There are a few quite big names in the industry that came out of Remote Control or from other assistant works but this needs to be taken with a grain of salt because on the other hand you could ask the question that if these “monopolies” wouldn’t suck the market dry of projects, there would generally be more projects that could be spread out between up and coming composers who work under their own name, nurturing their own career without being depending on being sub contracted by someone else. Of course, this wouldn’t mean that a composer who is just starting out would get the job that e.g. Remote Control got asked for and subcontracted it to someone from their team but it would mean that there would be more projects on the market to be shared between composers.

Of course this all is considerably more complex than the above. A client who gives a job to a composer who has a team behind them expects them to vouch for the quality and for reliability. Giving a project to a newbie is a huge risk, but composer careers are not black and white. There is a huge span between Hollywood A-list composers and first timers and the industry of monopolization also sucks the market dry for composers who have some reputation and would very much be proper candidates for the job but don’t get it because they would have been second or third call candidates but first call big score studio X accepted the gig and handed it down in their own food chain. In recent times I heard a lot of stories from colleagues who didn’t get a gig because the production company had a contract or agreement to exclusively work with one specific score company/studio.

And because everything has to do with everything part of this development is also based on the development of the film industry. Projects get too big to fail, decisions need to be signed off by many instances and risks need to be minimized. Part of this development is also that music is expected to ideally be “industry standard” – for the better and the worse. Score companies that have proven to deliver, who have a roster of assistant composers who can write a lot of music in the desired style in short time have the advantage here. Individual composer profiles in the music are often not desired anymore but the question is more if the music can ideally be as close as possible to temp track X because “we know this just works”. Another big factor is that time lines for many production nowadays can simply not be handled by one individual anymore. Editing till the last moment, market research and its consequences often require a lot of music to be written in a very short amount of time. And in these cases, composer teams have a huge advantage.

So in many ways, this approach of the composer as a "brand label" is the best answer to the state of the industry. But it also diminishes individual musical profiles of composers, coherent and homogeneous concepts and in general this one artistic voice that speaks out of the entire project. It is striking how generic most “mid class” scores have become. And by mid class I mean these scores that the a list “score companies” hand down the chain in their hierarchies. There are of course exceptions and in some instances it works extremely well to work in a team on a project and as I said above, it makes a lot of sense to structure a scoring business like this. But this comes at a cost. It is of course an individual choice how to build up one’s career and weighing the pros against the cons of each business model probably has a very different outcome depending on who you ask.

My personal approach in this regard is to rather delegate excess work to colleagues rather than subcontracting it to someone else. In consequence, I might be getting some jobs from them when they have too much on their plate so this approach balances itself out. Sure it would be great to attach my name to any project that I get asked for but I hate admin work so I prefer to rather hand it entirely over to someone I trust rather than me still keeping the hat on with these. Of course, there are occasional projects that I definitely want my name to be attached to or clients that I don't want to dissappoint by telling them that I don't have time. In these cases I do subcontract some work. But my general approach is that when you hire me you get me working on your project. Personally, I think that this slows down my career development but in my personal pro against con weighing I feel that this is the better way for me to go artistically.