Every day, our team fields requests for music that repeat the same genres, moods, and styles. If you monitor the Music Wanted section on your artist dashboard, you may have noticed this trend yourself. Words like ‘upbeat,’ ‘determined,’ and ‘dreamy’ are common among our requests from brands, agencies, and independent filmmakers. Pop, dance/electronic, R&B/soul/funk, and hip-hop are the most requested genres.
The best way to take advantage of these requests is to ensure your music is discoverable. Your music distribution or sync licensing partner will typically ask you to identify the tempo, genres, moods, or themes when you upload your music. You need to supply this information – known as metadata – so that your music will appear in the results when people key in specific search terms. Metadata now drives the music industry, so you should take this step seriously.
Among the many services that rely on metadata are the major streaming platforms, which use metadata to create playlists, particularly mood-based playlists. Sync licensing services similarly rely on accurate metadata to ensure clients can find music that stylistically matches their projects. And while it has become popular to use moods to categorize music, genre and subgenre classification remains vital. This is particularly true for sync, where a combination of data and professional instinct informs music selections.
To learn more about the perfect music genres for film and TV in 2022, we turned to our music experts, who spend their days fulfilling briefs and sourcing music for film, TV, and commercial projects. Here are the genres to focus on when writing, composing or submitting music for sync licensing opportunities.
Here are 5 music genres that are perfect for Film & TV
Pop
Pop music is the most recurrent genre in film and TV projects – particularly for teen and young adult projects where it is essential to have a dialogue with the audience. Because most people receive pop music well, it’s often the genre of choice. TikTok’s influence is also notable. The social media app is an important platform for making a song viral, and pop music is a primary benefactor.
Folk/Acoustic
Acoustic music works exceptionally well in emotional scenes, where there is a desire to create an intimate connection between the main characters and the audience. Many beautiful sync placements illustrate this, including Nick Drake’s “Horn” in Episode 2 of Normal People and Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides” in the last episode of After Life Season 3.
Funk Carioca
Funk Carioca is a popular Brazilian music style that mixes different genres like Miami bass, soul, funk, and hip-hop. The genre was created in the favelas and is linked with baile funk (funk parties). Therefore, many people identify and connect the genre to parties or discotheques. In the last few years, it has become common to hear this music on film and television throughout Latin America.
Rap/Hip-hop
Megan Thee Stallion, Drake, Travis Scott, and Cardi B are just a few of the names regularly used as reference points for sync. Nineties and early 2000s hip-hop tracks remain popular for time-period scenes. A great example is the ABC drama Queens, starring 90s hip-hop legends Eve, Brandy, Nadine Velazquez, and Naturi Naughton. However, old-school hip-hop is less popular for larger commercial projects where brands want music to reflect current pop-cultural trends.
Classical
Classical music fits many different situations and is highly versatile. It can be effective in a war scene or a sex scene, and there are many examples, from Platoon to the Amazon series Lov3, where it has had an impact. Public domain also offers classical music a significant advantage. If a composition has already fallen into public domain, the producer only has to license the recording rights. This saves both time and money and can make or break a project.
