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 websites. Cons: Exhaustive to search through and the songs you find may not be the right fit for the company’s branding 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 and can save countless production hours spent searching for and retrofitting library music. It’s like the difference between tailoring an off-the-rack suit to be a pretty good fit versus having a suit that was custom-made to fit you.

Recently, V3 Media Marketing worked with composer and musician William Jefferies on a project to help explore the value of custom scored music.

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 William Jefferies. 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. “We were able to understand the target demographic and vibe of the project,” says Jefferies,”and create supporting music that met those goals better than any pre-made stock music can.”

VERSION WITH CUSTOM SCORE MUSIC

VERSION WITH ROYALTY FREE MUSIC

IN CONCLUSION

If you have the time and inclination to search through library music, you may find exactly what you need for your video production. But it will rarely fit a company’s branding as well as a custom score, and will never be able to precisely match the action and emotion points in your video.