The commercial music industry has undergone many shifts over the last few years, with most of them stemming directly from technological advances changing the way music is made and heard. Thus, this year's edition of the Boards commercial music roundtable found our participants - music industry execs ranging from agency music producers to music house composers and owners - waxing prophetically about the future of the craft while weighing in with concern over how the new "instant gratification" era has impacted the art - and commerce - of the commercial music industry.

PARTICIPANTS:

DRAZEN BOSNJAK - President, Q Department, New York
GREGORY GRENE - Music producer, Foote Cone & Belding, New York
KEITH HALUSKA - Managing director/executive producer, MassiveMusic, New York
JEFF KOZ - Founder/CD, HUM Music, Los Angeles

Boards: Let's start with any trends that you've noticed emerging over the last year.

Koz: For us, [we've] not only been pursuing licensing and original music, but also a lot of different routes or musical solutions at the same time, as a lot of the time when clients come to us they don't know what they want. They'll think they want to license a song, but once they go down that path and realize a song's not available or it's going to cost ten times what they thought it was going to cost...

Bosnjak: ...Or it has five samples that'll need 10 years to clear because the people that recorded the original tracks are dead.

Haluska: On a personal level for me, coming from a place that only used in-house writers [Elias Arts], I'm now able to work with any composer in the world at this point, and if there are two composers I want, I can see what happens when I put them together. They don't have to be in the same country or even the same continent. So while the technology's old, it's come to the point where you can just collaborate with anybody, anywhere. That's different for me, and it's a big deal.

Bosnjak: I had an amazing experience recently collaborating with people in Amsterdam and in Bosnia, as we scored a new movie by Danis Tanovic (No Man's Land). It was crazy because my composer in Bosnia and he were sitting in a studio together either in Bosnia or Paris, writing the themes and stuff. They then sent us material with the film and we were orchestrating, arranging and producing music mostly in New York and sending it back and forth. If someone had told me that we'd be able to produce music for an entire feature over two or three months online, I wouldn't have believed it, but that's exactly what happened.

Boards: Have branded content and mobile initiatives had much of an impact on your business thus far?

Koz: It's definitely been exploding. This year, what we've been trying to do with our clients is help them to see the possibilities in creating assets beyond the commercials they come to us for. More and more, we're being asked to help them come up with ideas. For example, for Microsoft, we came up with a couple of tracks that were based on an MSN search campaign that we created full-length versions for, which were available as downloads. And then for the infamous Paris Hilton/Carl's Jr. commercial, we went ahead and created a full-length single version of the tune [Cole Porter's "I Love Paris"] with the vocalist who sang the track, Eleni Mandell, and that was available for download on iTunes. So our clients are still catching up with what's possible.

Bosnjak: There was a cell phone game that we worked on called Pax Athletica that was co-branded with Adidas - that was interesting. We're currently working on doing sound and effects for cell phone games for Mini Cooper with Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Tricycle NYC. We also did a super-interesting, weird project for Adidas, produced by a company called Soundwalk. It was a triple-CD release of walks through Manhattan, covering three different "stripes" - Yankee Stadium, graffiti and hip-hop. You start listening at a certain location, and as you put it on, you get instructed by a voice-over as to where to go and what you're going to experience, and this then turns into a sound collage that's very interesting. These are definitely things that people haven't attempted before, and it's very interesting to write things that aren't necessarily for the TV medium. What happens once you start writing for the cell phone? There are different rules of physics there - it's quite wild.

Boards: What about the role of licensed songs - how has that evolved recently?

Grene: Something that turned everything on its head for us was when FCB wound up breaking a major label track in the United States ahead of the CD via a Diet Coke ad. It was "I Like The Way" by Bodyrockers and I think it was the first time we were able to break a track almost a full month before the release. And when the CD came out, it had a sticker on it saying 'As seen on the Diet Coke commercial.' I think it's an exciting development, where advertising has become a conduit for art rather than us being regarded as scheming Machiavellis trying to cheapen the music by using it to sell potato chips. We're now considered to be arbiters of good taste because the labels don't have the marketing finances they used to have or the control of the market they used to. Advertising is one of the remaining outlets where you can get things out there to millions and millions of people.

Koz: We just finished the Honda spot ["Tailpipe"] with the M.I.A. track "Galang", and Interscope is just over the moon about it, wanting to do all sorts of stuff with us. Again, it's that reversal where the record company is now calling us and saying 'How can we partner up on this?' They're putting a lot of energy behind the single now because of the exposure of it being on a really hot spot.

Boards: Let's discuss further the use of freelance composers.

Haluska: Massive uses nothing but exclusive freelance composers, and we don't really have any intention of doing it differently. You need to get specialists and you need to get different perspectives. You can burn people out if you're bringing them in and getting them to write two tracks every day. How long can you do that and still be good? I think it's a great development and I think more people than ever are embracing that idea.

Koz: We have a combination. We use, and always have used, in-house - there's something very special about the simplicity of working as a composer with the client in the same room. That's the era that I come from, and there's something special about that collaborative process that I don't want to give up. But we've also embraced freelance composers for a number of reasons - mainly, the demand for the amount of music you're expected to crank out.

Bosnjak: For me, what I try to do when we go out there and look for freelancers and build relationships, is try and find people who are involved in authentic production of culture. We've worked with Simon Johns from Stereolab, Datach'i from Planet Mu, Sound Tribe Sector 9... It stops feeling like work and can be really exciting.

Grene: There are pluses, but I do believe very strongly in music houses having an ethos. If I was asking a house what areas they really excel in and they said "We can do everything," I'd automatically think this is a hack house and they're not much good. No matter whether you're using freelancers or not, there has to be some sort of 'heart' in the house. Yes, a music house is about commerce but it's also very much about art, and if there's no heart in there, there's no art taking place and it's not a place I'm interested in going.

Boards: How do you think the client's perceptions have altered concerning music in their spots?

Bosnjak: In general, I have clients who are my favorites because when they're producing music with us, they treat us respectfully, we get good sized budgets, a great timeline, and you can get down to business and do the work the way it should be done. It's unfortunate when you get emails on 7:30 on a Friday night saying 'I'm out the door now, but here's the brief.' And they expect it on Monday. That's one thing that I'd like to be able to educate our clients, our agencies, and producers about - I think people should be aware of how much the relationship with your client can affect the quality of the music. If it's great, you feel better about everything. Otherwise, it's just something that everyone laughs about when they're getting drunk in a bar at the end of the night.

Grene: Expectations for music in spots have really skyrocketed.

Haluska: Yeah, music will not save your spot. Often, that's the beginning of the conference call: 'We really think music can save this.' No, it can't! Music can reinforce the story you're trying to tell and point you in an emotional direction, but it's not going to save your spot.

Boards: What other challenges do you see emerging for the industry over the next year?

Koz: I've noticed the disappearance of the final music session. With what our business has become over the last couple of years, the evolution of the music track has become a moving target. There's a lot of 'We like that, we like this, but change that' and it all goes to one guy at his workstation doing all these revisions. And then it gets to the point where it's 'Stop! We love it, everything's great.' And then it stops.

Bosnjak: The clients are learning that they can get things cheap and then once everyone is working for a certain amount of money, you actually can't afford to get live musicians and do proper sessions. That's why technology comes in handy - nobody has money for anything so let's just bump up some samples and call it a day. I personally hate it, and I'm so bored with sampling that all I really want to do is just record everything live - mike everything. Everybody's getting used to clicking the mouse on the screen and getting sound through their laptops or even their iPods. We're getting rid of all this beauty and artistry that we strove for years to learn how to create in favor of crunching everything down to one megabyte to send over. I'm personally hoping that people will one day say 'Wait a minute - this is all sounding paper-thin and it doesn't have any value.'

Haluska: We should also probably look as an industry at what's happening with other industries around the world, and that's the tendency to go offshore for things. You can find people to write and record your music for a lot cheaper than we do here in the States. We basically have to prove our worth - why shouldn't they go somewhere else?

Koz: The best players in all of our cities are union musicians. They're the most incredible talent, and we want to be able to keep using them.

Bosnjak: Exactly. I keep telling my clients 'Please make this a union job.'

Haluska: I think this goes for music in general but people aren't that well-trained in how to listen. The drop-off in musicianship to your clients' ears is not as discernible as the money they're saving by going overseas and avoiding paying these people.

Boards: What about some positive changes that have occurred with these new developments?

Grene: I will say that in a way because of the inundation of information, you will have certain clients who are not only open to but are desperately seeking something that is really distinctive and those are the projects that are really exciting to work on.

Koz: That can be seen as an outgrowth of the iPod, because now with people having thousands of songs on their persons, they've all become 'music historians', and the creatives now know just as much about music as the music houses do in terms of what's happening and cool. They are very different conversations we're having now.

Haluska: Anything that gets people to listen to our work with headphones is a good thing.

HUM> www.humit.com
Foote Cone & Belding> www.fcb.com
Massive Music> www.massivemusic.com
Q Department> www.qdepartment.com