The Largely Ignored Patrons of Music

 Payel Majumdar

Is producing music for ads a lucrative option for musicians, singers and music producers to support their careers with its vast reach to the masses. Or is it just a dead-end job at the end of the day? SoundTree Magazine talks to Ayan De, Kaizad Gherda and Abhishek Arora, the brains behind successful campaigns like Godrej, Idea and Cadbury’s to find out what about scoring for advertising works for them and what does not.

Mark Foster, before he made it to worldwide stardom with Pumped Up Kicks, would write advertisement jingles for Mophonics in Venice, California, a brand that caters to clients in need for  original music. This had happened only after Mophonics started taking out CDs of their music produced. Not just that, Foster wrote all his singles while working his Mophonics job of writing jingles for advertising clients. Mark Foster would be waiting tables in Los Angeles as an aspiring singer songwriter before Altman, the creative head of Mophonics found him, and took him under his wing. Foster is not alone here. The Black Keys have done music for Victoria’s Secret and Sony Ericsson. So have Vampire Weekend, and many other bands.

Often underrated and overlooked when it comes to music, musicians who score for advertising films and spots are a great pool of creative talent in an industry that is perceived to provide financial feasibility for musicians to survive. They are often a great space for musicians to experiment and test newer waters. In India, as the advertisement film industry opens up further, this proves to be true for the burgeoning lot of independent musicians who take up music as their primary occupation.

(A Mark Foster jingle for Muscle Milk which became very popular four years ago below.)

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However, the advertising industry is largely disorganised in India, when it comes to music scoring. Companies such as Mophonics are non-existent, and singers and producers are hired from project to project as is done in the Bombay film industry as well. This might lead to the musicians getting a raw deal with unfair contracts, (read here) and miscommunication is another fear. Producer Ayan De, ex-member of Goddess Gagged and founder of Paralights, a regular producer for ads in the Indian market, expresses his concern about gaps in communication saying, “If you’re in touch with the brand directly, then it doesn’t matter. However often the creative agency is the middleman, and then something like Chinese whispers might happen as the middleman is unable to convey what is needed which results in us working over the same project again and again.”

“I think the Indian audience is the most open audience or market that we can have.”

Musically however, a lot of musicians who indulge in scoring for ad films are happy about the work they get to do as the advertising market has a far reach as well as being open to experimentation. Ayan recalls a recent ad for a chocolate brand which made use of innovative sound samples. “There was this very interesting ad campaign that I was part of where we used the sounds of biting into an ice-cream as the sounds of the drum, as part of the bass line. So that was different. You get a 140 character brief which you have to convert into a song. So it is your interpretation of it, depending upon what the client requires.” The limits put on the musician when it comes to composing or scoring for a video product is also not a deterrent for many. Abhishek Arora, producer for many major Indian advertisements including the latest Idea “No Ullu Banaaoing” ad campaign says, “When I had started scoring for ads, I often used to think of it as a limitation. However, with passing time I realized this is more of a challenge than a limitation as it binds you to think within a time-frame among other bindings.”

According to Kaizad Gherda, while there are standards things like a condition that there needs to be a high note or a trill when the name of the brand comes up, other than these conditions, musicians have creative freedom to produce. “The key point is that it (the song) needs to go with the video. The thing is, the song needs to sync with the audio. The second is that it needs to sync with the video as well. You need to keep in mind the product as well.”

When it comes to creative freedom for musicians, while film music often falls into the tropes of ‘formula’, advertising is relatively free of such compromises. Ayan De says, “I think the Indian audience is the most open audience or market that we can have. We have EDM and dub-step and folk on the other hand and then those slow-breezy kinds of songs. There is space for everything, and there is opportunity to pick up and explore a lot of potential music for musicians in ads.”

Since the ad film is an audio-visual product, and the music is not independent of the video, musicians always have to compose and arrange keeping the idea behind the video in mind. But there are instances as well, where music drives the film rather than the video. Ayan says, “Most ads are made like that where the video is shot first before work starts on the audio. For some very specific ads however, we tend to make the music first. That is because the ad campaign was around the music. For instance, the Godrej ad campaign, and an ad campaign that I recently did for Cadbury’s, we worked on the music from the beginning before work on the video had started.”

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He goes on to elaborate how the Godrej ad was memorable in terms of its music “I definitely liked the Godrej Aer ad because it was more than a jingle.” The lyrics of the song were crowd sourced from a twitter campaign and over 330 people came together in this anti-smoking campaign.

In between the tune and the tagline, the focus point of an ad differs. Mobile companies in the last year have all come up with tune driven advertisements. The viral song “Honey Bunny” by Idea set it off, leading on to Airtel’s “Har ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai” and recently Idea’s “No Ullu Banaaoing”. Abhishek, who was associated with the music for “No Ullu Banaaoing” says, “Sometimes, the tune and the tagline are linked together. For this ad, ‘No Ullu Banaaoing’ was the tagline which ended up being used up in the tune as well. ”

The approach really depends from ad to ad, depending upon the brief from the agency. “What tends to happen is, if there is a brand which is about to launch, it is often the tagline”, says Ayan. And when you need to participate in different platforms like television and radio then it is the tune. It is an execution thing. Understanding what the brand wants is important, but it has to be catchy.

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Advertising music is often looked at as a stop-gap measure by many involved in the production of brands that keep these things going. Musicians who produce for ads or sing in ad films have other projects on the side. Siddharth Basrur, in a recent interview told us how ad films are a good source of income which makes staying as an independent musician financially viable for him, and gives him space to do his own projects.

While it will be untrue to say things are all glorious as far as the scope and scale for musicians to work their musical chops go, the basic thing to be kept in mind, as Ayan says, is that everything goes “… as long as the client is fine with it. It is about convincing the audience what works for the brand. You can end up experimenting initially. But then you have the creative agency, the studio you are working with and the brand itself. So it ends up being about what they want. Which is fair and it is true since it is a job at the end of the day.”

Having said that, it won’t be unreasonable to assume, that India has space for organisations such as Mophonics, a singer-songwriter collective that provides original music to avant garde clients, the market is certainly ripe for it. After all, Mark Foster, post international fame, still works out of Mophonics’ office as the place where it all started for him.