From Studio To Screen: What Goes Into Making A Soundtrack?
May 5, 2016 Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh, Howl and Echoes
http://howlandechoes.com/2016/05/fro...ng-soundtrack/
For starters: every song has two parts to it, and you need a licence for each. The publishing (or synchronising) rights make up the written composition and the master rights pertain to the particular sound recording a filmmaker going to use. In some instances, there may be a number of parties with publishing rights. Say you want
The Chain by Fleetwood Mac for your movie: you need all five songwriters to give you the legal go ahead, along with their label and whoever owns the rights to the particular recording you want to use.
Typically, pulling together a soundtrack is a post-production effort. Even when a song is referenced in the screenplay, it might not always make it into the film. For instance, there may not the budget left for music when the time for music does come. Songs that play during the opening and closing credits in particular, can come at some pretty hefty prices, as they set the overall tone for the production. When there isn’t money left for music, filmmakers may look to relatively unknown artists in hopes that they will provide their songs under a gratis licences – that is, for free, but still legally contracted to the filmmaker. Or, they may find something in the Public Domain that has all the components of the composition arranged so that it does not require further licensing.
Often, a song that may have fit the screenplay doesn’t work for the actual film. In the case of the 2012 film The Perks of Being A Wallflower, David Bowie‘s Heroes replaced
Fleetwood Mac‘s Landslide, which had been heavily referenced in the original book. Heroes ended up in the film because, according to writer-director Stephen Chbosky, Landslide was too soft a ballad to fit with the footage.