What do This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Hockey Night in Canada, NYPD Blue, The Practice and Saturday Night Live have in common? Well, aside from all being TV shows, they all use stock audio.

And they aren’t alone. Stock audio – prerecorded music and sound effects – can be found in virtually all TV programs and commercials as well as most major movies.

‘Producers choose stock audio for two reasons: convenience and price,’ says Chris Stone, president of stock music supplier Chris Stone Audio Productions in Toronto. ‘Prerecorded music and effects are available exactly when they need them. Meanwhile, it is often cheaper – and certainly less risky – to use a track someone else has already written and recorded.’

‘Producers usually end up looking for stock audio when they’re out of two things – time and money,’ echoes Brian Nimens, president of Toronto SFX and royalty-free music publisher Sound Ideas.

Many audio studios use Sound Ideas’ collections of explosions, crashes and almost any other sound ever heard on the planet earth. A producer of SFX records and tapes in the 1980s, Sound Ideas hit the jackpot when it struck a deal with Philips to issue SFX CDs in the mid-’80s.

‘Back then, being on CD was a licence to print money,’ says Nimens.

Stock audio can also add punch when used creatively.

‘Years ago I was musical consultant for The Kids in the Hall,’ says John Ciccone, president of Toronto music supervisor Copyright Music & Visuals. ‘We originally used stock music for budgetary reasons, but soon found that it could be employed to great comedic effect.’

Stock music is originated by an array of creators in the composing field.

‘Composers started writing stock music back in the 1940s,’ Stone explains. ‘This was the time of the newsreels. Their producers needed thematic music to underscore their news stories, and needed it now.’

Stone’s stock music library is highlighted by tracks by John Barry, the five-time Oscar-winning composer, perhaps best known for his work on the James Bond films.

Producers can buy or lease a collection of different music tracks from the likes of Sound Ideas, Mississauga, ON’s Morning Music or Toronto’s Nightingale Music. These tracks are usually classified by genre and descriptive mood, such as ‘Battle at Sea.’ Costs for music libraries run into the hundreds of dollars. For instance, the 24-CD ‘Mix Signature Collection Combo’ from Sound Ideas costs US$395 (about C$514).

Theoretically, producers could buy their own stock audio, then spend hours sifting through the discs searching for the right tracks. However, in practice, they prefer to ask production studios such as Toronto’s Rocket Digital Post & Sound or Sound Ideas to do it for them.

In this scenario, producers don’t buy entire music collections. Instead, they just ‘rent certain tracks from the rights holders,’ says Stone. ‘This is known as a ‘needle drop,’ from the days when stock audio was distributed on LPs.’

The amount charged for needle drops depends on the extent of the rights. For instance, a production airing on Canadian TV could pay up to $60 per 30 seconds of stock music, rising to $300 to $400 per 30 seconds for worldwide ‘all media, all usage’ rights.

When producers approach Stone directly, he requests either a script or tape of the show in question.

‘Usually they’ll have ideas about what they want,’ Stone explains. ‘My job is to sift through my memory and our library to find the right musical genres, instrumental styles, moods, and even SFX, and then to boil it down to some options for them.’

These options are either played for the producers in Stone’s studio, or sent to them as CDs or e-mailed MP3s. Finally, once the cuts have been agreed upon, Stone burns a CD with the tracks in order, with voice slates indicating scene placement.

Stone’s encyclopedic musical knowledge protects producers from committing howlers, such as the time one client was shooting a program about the Titanic – which sank in 1912 – and wanted the band to play a song written in 1937.

‘I also take care to consider the ethnic origin of the music used,’ Stone says. ‘For instance, you don’t want to soundtrack footage about Serbians with a Croatian folk song.’

But despite the time advantage of using stock audio, it can sometimes actually be cheaper to commission original music, according to the math of Paul Hoffert, chair of the Guild of Canadian Film Composers.

‘We surveyed our members, and found that the mid-range price to compose and produce 20 minutes of music – enough for a half-hour TV show – is between $3,000 and $5,000,’ Hoffert says. ‘This price includes the musicians, the studio recording – the works. In contrast, the same length of stock music licensed for perpetual worldwide use – which is what our composers provide – averages about $8,000.’

Besides being written specifically to suit a production’s mood and storyline, original music has the virtue of being unique. In contrast, the same stock music can theoretically end up being chosen by different productions or rival advertisers.

‘Twenty-five years ago, Mazda and Datsun used the same stock track in their radio spots,’ Stone recalls. ‘Duplication is very rare, but it does happen.’

Nonetheless, stock audio’s convenience makes it a compelling choice for many TV and film producers. For them, the risk of duplication is one they are gladly willing to accept.

-www.stockmusicconsultants.com (Chris Stone)

-www.sound-ideas.com

-www.copyrightmv.com

-www.rocketdigital.ca