Case Study: The Power of Custom Music
A great promotional video is the result of a variety of resources being used to add up to something that “wows” the audience – great script, great direction, great crew, great equipment, and great editing. What’s the one underused resource? Great music!
Library music is one option. Pros: Royalty-free and readily available from a number of sources. Cons: Exhaustive to search through, often lacking in pizazz and the songs you find may not be the right fit for the company’s branding, product or the action in the video.
The solution? Custom-scored music, which has the benefit of precisely fitting both the action in the video and the company’s brand. Custom-scored music can save countless production hours spent searching for and retrofitting standard library music. It’s like the difference between an off-the-rack suit that is an average fit versus having a suit that was custom-tailored to fit you perfectly.
Recently, V3 Media Marketing worked with Fort Collins, Colorado-based award-winning professional composer, arranger, and sound designer David Wohl on creating custom music for our Welcome to MAX service lauch video.
Our goal was to show our client the advantages that custom-scored music can have over the off-the-shelf library music that is typically used by many production studios.
A Side-by-Side Comparison
Here is a side-by-side comparison of the library track we used for our client and the custom score by David Wohl. The library music is essentially an endless, repetitive loop – it’s like audio wallpaper. You can hear that the custom music has much greater depth and richness, and that it hits points of action in the video with a precision that’s not possible with library music.
Version with Custom-Composed Music
Version with Royalty-Free Music
In Conclusion
If you have the time and inclination to search through library music, you may find what you need for your video production. But it will rarely fit a company’s branding as well as a custom score does, and will never be able to precisely match the action and emotion points in your video. As David Wohl explains: “I feel my strongest contribution is to use music to distill and enhance the project’s specific emotion and drama, ensuring that the viewer feels precisely what the client wants him or her to feel.”
The MAX (Mason Corridor Express) Rapid Transit service is a service operated by Transfort, the public transportation operator for the metro area of Fort Collins, Colorado.
