Music plays an important supporting role in helping tell the story. It can communicate mood, feeling, sentiment and emotion, and importantly, doesn't need to have an ego about it. With music, often times, less is more. Be tasteful in your choices.
When it comes to choosing a production music library does size really matter? If you are in film, television or advertising production chances are you've hit the google search before to see what pops up when you enter stock music or music licensing and it's an overwhelming digital ocean of choice and claims . . ."900,000 Royalty Free Tracks" . . . "The Biggest Music Library in The Universe Ever Created" . . . "500,000 Music Tracks in 400 Genres" and so on. Yikes! How is a creative professional supposed to navigate all of this to find what they need?
Chances are, you are looking for the right track and chances are you need one piece of music in that moment.
Unequivocally, our vote is to choose QUALITY over quantity every time.
Two reasons:
1) Music Search Fatigue. There are some libraries out there with 100,000 tracks but only a fraction that are even worth a listen. More likely than not, you need to sift through lots of subpar tracks in order to find anything decent and that takes way too much time. The result, you either settle for something less than great, convince yourself you found something better than you have because the search is taking so long or wind up giving up altogether because you cant find what you need. Exhausting.
Good libraries have a deep bench of well meta-tagged tracks. Search should be easy, quick and the quality high (even fun!). You shouldn't have to weed out bad tracks to get the one you want, rather come away with a few choices and options that you feel great about.
2) The Human Touch. Most large music libraries are music mills. They are run by webmasters and not music supervisors or creative professionals, they are automated and lack meaningful human input and might as well be selling toasters, socks or books. Robots don't make music. Composers do. Databases don't care about your project, but a high quality music library will go out of their way to help you make it amazing. Smaller and mid-size libraries typically have a terrific staff of creative professionals standing at the ready to assist you. These people live and breath their music catalogs and often times have the right music knowledge to help you find the gems that fit your project. Hug a music supervisor (we hug back)!
m2c
The Diner Music