Ryan Francis Bradley

Making music to sit in a library and potentially get picked up and used in a TV show.

or commercial nowadays, that whole ecosystem where you would have on-staff studio musicians is pretty rare.

Yeah, and that's like a nine to five job.

I mean, the vast majority of musicians are independent contractors.

Early on in my reporting, I was talking to a musician who is 9 to 5.

He's an independent contractor, and his 9 to 5 is making sync music.

And he described it to me.

I was like, I'm so interested in exploring this kind of corner of the music industry.

And he's like, let me stop you there, man.

This is the music industry.

For a lot of us, this is how we make it work.

I mean, certainly in terms of the number of tracks available and the number of tracks that are being made, I think there's a whole lot of young people trying to break in to sync and make a living that way.

There are also very serious record producers who

described to me Sync as their 401k.

It's like their retirement plan because they can steadily make Sync music and then still be waiting for that, you know, once or twice a year working on a big record and having a big payday.

What was really interesting to me was that because we live in this age where we're drowning in video and a lot of people encounter new songs through video platforms, video forward platforms, a lot of the tricks of sync have influenced how pop music is made in a way.

I mean, there's this interesting kind of gray area between what is a sync track and what is a pure pop song.

And what is working for pop often now has a lot of is kind of borrowing a lot of the moves from sync where you have these instrumental breaks between lyrics and you have this like orchestral build.

One of the most successful sync tracks last year, which is just kind of based off of how often it was used to back videos on TikTok and also in commercials.

Zara Larsson, by a lot of metrics, the kind of the biggest sync track of 2025.