Panel interviewed by Michael Laskow at TAXI’s Road Rally conference, November, 2023
Music Supervisor Mason Cooper raises his hands in victory after making a funny comment on the, "Does It Feel Like Your Music Has Gone Into a Black Hole" panel at the 2023 TAXI Road Rally. He was joined by (left to right), Pedro Costa, Matt Vander Boegh, Craig Pilo, and Vince Nicotina.
Editor’s Note: We’re repeating the introduction to this panel at the beginning of each month’s section to give the discussion that follows some context.
Moderator, Michael Laskow asks the audience seated in the ballroom: How many of you have had music forwarded by TAXI and feel like it’s gone into a black hole? [Lots of audience members’ hands go up] That’s why we’re doing this panel.
We’ve got a bona fide panel of experts up here to help you understand if it is a black hole or it isn’t. On the left we’ve got Pedro Costa, who’s a music library CEO that started out as a TAXI member, so he’s seen the black hole from both sides of the coin. Next to him we’ve got Mason Cooper who’s a highly-experienced music supervisor working on films and TV shows. We’ve got Matt Vander Boegh, who has become one of TAXI’s more successful members over many years. Next to him we’ve got Craig Pilo, who is TAXI’s head screener, as well as a composer and a music library owner himself. And then we’ve got TAXI member Vince Nicotina, who posted this on TAXI’s Forum.
“Recently, I’ve received a series of cue sheets, and got some nice payouts from instrumentals in my ASCAP quarterly statement, too. It seems that my music was played all over the place in 2022, and I had no idea about it.
Some of the places I’ve had music in 2022 were Stromboli, a Dutch movie on Netflix; Celebrity and Somebody, Korean TV shows on Netflix; Emmerdale and Coronation Street, long-running British TV shows; as well as other TV shows in the U.K., France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Romania, Honduras, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia; and The Con on ABC, a true-crime show.”
Then Vince wrote a follow-up email. “In 2023 so far, I’ve had tunes in the finale of Grease, Rise of the Pink Ladies, on Paramount+. Had some stuff on German TV, but it’s probably too soon to know what happened overseas. The Paramount+ placement paid me a $1,000 sync fee. The true-crime show came from a deal I made through TAXI Forward, and my co-writer was somebody I met in the registration line at the Road Rally. My Paramount+ deal came from a library I learned about from a guy I met at the bar at the Road Rally.
This just goes to show that there really is a long gap of one to two years between when your music gets placed and when you learn about that placement. It takes even longer to get paid, so if you’re frustrated that you got some tunes in a library and they never got placed, just wait a couple of years before you do anything rash.
The rule of thumb is just keep making more music, getting it in more libraries. That’s the plan. I only have a little over 100 tunes in libraries, but the action is finally starting to pick up. Now I need to press for 200 tunes.”
Thank you, Vince, for inspiring us.
Part 4 begins here:
Craig, put on your Head Screener hat and answer this question: “A track of mine was forwarded by one screener, but not by another. How can two people feel so differently about the same piece of music?”
Craig: Easily. First of all, it was probably for two different listings.
“But they were both rock listings with male vocals!”
Craig: But as Mason pointed out, sometimes the scene, if it’s for a movie scene or a TV show, has two different moods. So you can even have the same instrumentation, but maybe the tempo was off by 10 beats per minute. Maybe the ending wasn’t good, maybe the intro was too long, maybe the vocals were too loud, maybe the mix was bad. Each listing with TAXI is client-specific. Pedro’s gonna want one thing, Mason wants something else. I want them both to be happy, but they both need something. Maybe it’s similar, but it’s also a little bit different. And that’s why the same song can be forwarded for one listing, and not for another similar listing.
So you’re saying members should read the whole listing, and pay close attention to the details that can make the difference?
Craig: Exactly. And it happens all the time. It is not uncommon. People are like, “Wow, your screeners don’t know anything.” Actually, they’re pretty damn talented, I gotta be honest. I’m more and more impressed with the TAXI screeners. Every week I go to work there—and we have an incredible staff of screeners, and they’re really smart… They’re human, mistakes can happen, and we try our best, but it’s rare. Like 97% of the time, maybe more, maybe 99% of the time, these guys and girls are just on point. They have really good ears; they’re able to articulate the brief. They see the same brief we send to all of you, by the way, it’s not different. So again, back to what Michael said, it’s up to you to read it carefully and put your best foot forward.
“You really have to write something just for that listing, because whatever you did for some other brief, it’s not the same.”
Going along with that same theme, Vince, what have you done to get better at interpreting the TAXI listings? And do you feel like you have gotten better, and you’ve become more successful getting forwards since you figured that out?
Vince: Yes, I did get better. Yeah, I think reading the listing very carefully… And probably the biggest thing that made the difference for me is writing something custom for the brief. If I really take it seriously and I write something custom for that brief, at this point I’m probably gonna get it forwarded. I don’t always do that still, so sometimes I have songs lying around that didn’t make it somewhere else and they’re close to what the listing asks for, and I just feel this temptation, “Oh, what the hell? Maybe it’ll work,” and it never works. Maybe it worked once, but it almost never works.
For the most part, you really have to write something just for that listing, because whatever you did for some other brief, like Craig just said, it’s not the same. Maybe one word is different, and that’s the word that’s gonna get you crossed off the list because you didn’t do that one thing that they asked you to do.
“There is no Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Everything is transparent, and we work very closely with the clients to make sure that the brief reflects exactly what they want, and it’s kind of up to you guys to just meet all those criteria.”
Craig… A lot of people, I believe—because I’ve heard this anecdotally for 32 years—a lot of people think the screeners are looking for reasons to not forward. They’re looking for that one word in the listing that we go, “Aha, busted you. You didn’t do X, Y or Z.” Is that true or not?
Craig: Absolutely not. And it makes TAXI look bad. I mean, how bad does TAXI look if we don’t forward anything? If we have to go to Pedro and go, “Man, I’m sorry, we didn’t, we got nothing.” Or Mason, “Man, I’m sorry, we wanted the gig, but we didn’t….” It makes us look terrible. It’s the opposite of that. We are trying to find stuff that meets all the criteria, but you have to do your part and dot your I’s and cross your T’s. We can’t forward a B minus to these guys that are doing A plus work. Mason’s got a director to answer to; he’s got a music supervisor to answer to; I’ve got you [Michael] to answer to.
We all have to answer to somebody, and it has to be right. You know, at TAXI we try to forward tons of stuff, and I sign off on a lot of those playlists personally, but it has to be right. You know, it’s gonna make us look bad if we forward stuff that isn’t what they asked for, and the screeners get the same brief that you do. There is no Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Everything is transparent, and we work very closely with the clients to make sure that the brief reflects exactly what they want, and it’s kind of up to you guys to just meet all those criteria. And we forwarded some great stuff, we have a lot of talent out there. But you know, like Michael said, it really has to be perfect for us to send it forward. And we don’t look for reasons to return it, we look for reasons to forward it.
Mason: I’d like to add something, and it works with all of what you guys have said. The briefs are so important. From my perspective as a music supervisor, I struggle with, “How do I create the right brief to communicate to TAXI, so they can effectively communicate it to you?” Because we want—just like Craig just said—TAXI wants to love your music, they want to find the right song and get it to me. I want your music—I’ve said this at the mentor lunch—I want to get to a yes and love your song immediately, because the minute I find your song for that spot and I’m done, I can take my wife out to dinner, I can go play golf or I can go on vacation. We want the positive; nobody wants the negative. So you need to emotionally know that nobody’s looking to say “no.” And finding the brief, I work with the staff and with Tom and with people. I’ll write the brief, they’ll send it back to me to review and they’ll help hone it in or I’ll hone it in, because how do you communicate music? It’s the old joke in the studio: “It’s good, but can you sing a little more purple?” You know, how do you use words with music? So it’s the same thing with the brief: We’re all trying to hone it in. You know, to paraphrase Jerry Maguire, “How can I help you help me? That’s the whole nature of the entire business right there in Jerry Maguire-speak.
Matt, when you first started creating music, before you were going to a third-party studio and paying them to do your stuff and then you woke up, said, “This is really expensive, not very quick, not very productive,” so you went out and bought Pro Tools. I will be telling this story until they’re throwing dirt on my coffin someday. Matt said he turned on Pro Tools, got the splash screen and went, “Well that’s great; now what do I click?” He was about as clueless as you could be—and it’s not that he’s unintelligent, he was just uninitiated. He didn’t have a black-and-white keyboard, so he was hitting like the letter “A” on his Qwerty keyboard for the note A. So having come from nothing, I mean literally from as ground zero as it gets, to being as productive as it gets and being able to respond to a listing by creating something for the listing, which is, by the way, if you don’t know that, then you haven’t been watching TAXI TV or coming to Road Rallies or reading the newsletter. You have to get to the point where you are good enough and fast enough to create music in your home studio to answer these requests. Because anytime you’re taking something that’s on the shelf, as Vince just attested to, there’s a really high probability it’s not gonna work because it wasn’t created to fill the need.
Matt, how important is it to write to the brief? How did you learn how to do it quickly?
Matt: Hmm… good question. So back before I started making music at home, as Michael said, I used to go to a recording studio and I was paying, I can’t remember, $50 or $65 an hour to make songs. And when you do the math on that, I don’t know what each song ended up costing, but a lot of hundreds of dollars, and I was determined that they were going to find a home somewhere even if I had to force them.
And so, I remember—this may be slightly off topic, but we’ve mentioned something similar. I was writing these country songs and I had one that was a piano-driven, male-vocal country song, and there was a TAXI listing that was asking for Beatles-influenced songs, so I clicked on the example and it was a Beatles song that was piano-driven, and I said, “I got a piano-driven song,” and I sent in a country song. So I’ve done that. And it got rejected, and I’m like, you sons of bitches. But it’s got a piano.
So I decided I was going to write music on my own, because that was the only way I could write custom music for listings, because there was no way I could do it at a recording studio—time didn’t allow for it. If a listing was two weeks away and I wanted to write a song for it, how the hell would I schedule time at a recording studio to get it recorded, mixed, mastered, and back to me in time for that listing? There is just no way, because the studio’s got their own schedule, they’re booked up all the time, and it would be way too late and way too expensive to do that. So, I realized I had to make music on my own, and it took a couple of… I don’t know, it took at least one year of making absolute garbage all day, every day before I ever even got to the level where I was actually getting some amount of forwards, because it was just garbage. But I was getting my reps in nonetheless, and that’s like going to the gym. I kept telling people this at lunch the other day. You can’t expect to grow your biceps if you go to the gym and do a one-arm curl every three months. You gotta go in and you just gotta slam them out. And so, that’s what I was doing—I was just getting my reps in. And at some point I realized, look, the TAXI listing is a recipe. It’s like if you’re cooking and you’re making spaghetti and you wanna follow this recipe to make the perfect, whatever, spaghetti alfredo.
I think it’s fettuccine, but we get the point. [audience laughter]
Matt: See, I would screw that up too. For someone who’s not a cook, you just follow that frickin’ recipe. And if it says put a quarter teaspoon of salt, you add a quarter teaspoon of salt, and if it says to add this, well, you add that! And if you did it all right, then you’ve got exactly what you set out to make. And so I started looking at the TAXI listings as recipes, because they’re laying out all the ingredients that you need in the right order—simmer at 325 for 10 minutes, you know, have a buttoned ending, and it’s gotta have at least two edit points, you know, whatever the ingredients are, you just do that and you will have hit the recipe. Now, whether you like it at the end, I don’t know, maybe it came out a little wonky, but…
Mason: I get asked a lot, “Should I write a song for your film?” So you guys are talking about writing to the briefs. But, if you for some reason find out that the scene is about a restaurant candlelight dinner, don’t write a song about a restaurant candlelight dinner. That’s too literal. There are always exceptions, but we’re not looking for literal, so it boils down to, “How do I get the essence and the emotion of that?” Now, if you’re writing to a TAXI brief because you feel that you can get close—like Vince was talking about how he now does that constantly—and you do that, that’s fine because it’s an inspiration to write a song.
Write a great song, just write a great song. That’s subjective. If you write every word and every note that you love and that you feel expresses what you wanted to express, you wrote your great song. Then you submit it, and if it gets forwarded, awesome. Win, win, win, it keeps going. And if not, you have a great song.
Vince: Yeah. That can be used elsewhere at some other point for another brief.
Matt: You just built your catalog, and you got another bicep rep in. And you got experience!
Don’t miss the final part of this informative panel in next month’s TAXI Transmitter!