Library music: soundtracks to a strange if familiar world

About a decade ago I used to write library music – that commercial sounding, sorta-non-specific, but still vibe-y music that accompanies anything from dog food commercials to corporate explainer videos. It’s kind of everywhere but super lowkey as its main role is to sound like something, without actually being too noteworthy. A musical bed, a mood maker, but not the main event.

Writing this kind of music, as a creative process, was kind of fun, if often accidentally surreal. You receive a brief from a library music publisher – perhaps a page or two long – which lays out the schtick of what they’re after. These briefs could be brilliantly written, tightly scoped descriptions of a mood or setting and genre. Other times they were highly inscrutable and mystifying.

Unlike personal songwriting, library music composition is quite rule governed which soon reveals your limitations as a muso. It’s both generic in nature and exacting to produce. The best library writers have real range and can mimic any style. Thankfully I was often working with my good pals Piney Gir and Garo Nahoulakhian – both immensely talented collaborators – and we could cook up something really interesting while stretching our wings a bit.

There was the track that accompanied dogs vaulting over hedges for 6 months as a promo ident to “You’ve Been Framed!” – a show that turns out to be on a staggering number of times a week if you had cable (minor kerching noise here). There was the Morris dancing track 🤪 that ended up in Coach Trip, a kind of cheap-as-chips structured reality show – and became quite a good earner. And the dashed off song about ‘a lady pirate’ (do the Partridge voice) which somehow made it into the back of a scene in the American show ‘Portlandia’.

🎶 You can hear a selection here.

These days library music has joined the list of things-that-seem-vulnerable-to-AI - although I suspect that’s overstated (for reasons I explained last year). The sheer number of talented people who are quietly composing delightful and thoughtful collections makes me wonder why you’d bother using gen-AI.

Of course, the real glory days of library were those produced by the KPM writers of the 60s and 70s. Funky, jazz trained cats with budgets for real studios. Man! 👇

Keith Mansfield - Funky Fanfare