How to brief music in plain language

Most music searches fail for the same reason: the person searching describes a genre when what they actually have is a scene.

A genre is a shelf. A scene is a situation — a picture, a pace, an emotion, a moment where something changes. If you hand over the shelf, you get the shelf back. If you hand over the situation, you get music that fits the cut.

Why tag hunting runs out of road

Tags are useful for filing and terrible for deciding. "Uplifting corporate" describes several thousand tracks, and the difference between the one that works and the nine hundred that do not is never in the tag. It is in the tempo against the edit, in whether the vocal fights your voice-over, in whether the arrangement leaves room at 0:42 where the logo lands.

Tag hunting also hides the thing you did not think to ask for. If you only search what you can name, you only ever find what you already imagined.

What a good brief contains

We ask for five things, in whatever order they come out:

• Picture — what is on screen, literally. Two people in a kitchen. A drone shot over a plant floor. A product turning on black.
• Pace — how the edit moves. Long takes, or a cut every eight frames.
• Emotion — where the viewer should be at the end, not just the start. "Starts wary, ends warm" is more useful than "happy".
• Function — what the music has to do. Carry a voice-over. Fill a silence. Land a punchline. Push a button.
• Boundaries — what must not happen. No vocals over the dialogue. Nothing that sounds like a pharmaceutical ad. Nothing with a drop.

That last one does more work than people expect. Exclusions narrow a catalogue faster than any positive description.

A before and after

Before: "Upbeat indie pop, 120 BPM, energetic, corporate."

After: "Sixty-second brand film for a family bakery. Handheld, warm daylight, quick cuts of hands working dough, slows down at the end on a shopfront at dusk. Should feel proud but unshowy — small business, not startup. Voice-over across the middle third, so nothing busy in the mids. No big drop, no whistling."

Both are the same length. Only one describes a film.

Reference tracks, used correctly

A reference is a shortcut, not an order. When you paste a track or a YouTube link, tell us why it is the reference: the groove, the instrumentation, the restraint, the mood at 1:10. A reference without a reason is read as "sounds like this", and "sounds like this" is usually not what you meant.

Leave room for the option you did not ask for

The strongest music choice in a campaign is often not the one that matched the brief most literally. It is the one that reframed the film — the same scene carried by a different genre, and suddenly the brand has a voice instead of a soundtrack.

So write your brief tightly, then stay open on the way back. We deliberately answer with more than one direction for exactly this reason.

A short checklist

Before you hit search, make sure your brief says:

1. What is on screen
2. How the edit moves
3. Where the emotion starts and ends
4. What the music has to make room for
5. What it must never do
6. Why any reference is a reference

Six lines. That is a brief.

Describe your scene in the catalog and see what comes back — or read how our Music Supervisor reads a brief.

Hear it in practice

Two of our curated playlists that show this in the music itself:

• Corporate Inspiration — for corporate films, explainers and brand content that need measured optimism, progress and clear forward motion.
• Tension & Suspense — under case files, CCTV sweeps, and server-room reveals; builds from low ambient beds to percussion-led trailer cues for a chase…