Why streaming platforms are scrubbing the soundtracks from your favorite shows

Over the last few years, I’ve begun to experience a very unique kind of personal Mandela effect familiar to anyone born before the 21st century. When I watch old TV shows, I discover they don’t really sound the same. The issue isn’t the dialogue, it’s the music.

I first noticed this during an extremely ill-advised How I Met Your Mother rewatch on Netflix before the pandemic, and have since encountered it again when revisiting  X-Files, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and most recently Gilmore Girls. Others have lodged similar complaints against everything from Friday Night Lights to Supernatural to Dawson’s Creek.

The answer as to why all of these shows sounded different, it turns out, is fairly simple: Streaming services upended the royalties system that managed music for film and TV for almost a century. Due to intricate licensing deals, when TV shows get added to a streaming library, certain music cues don’t make it. It’s also a fairly insidious example of a core tension at the heart of our entire digital landscape right now. We can watch or listen to almost anything ever produced, but have no control over how it’s preserved. 

And, worse, the people who score the soundtracks for the content we spend hours every week consuming continue to struggle making a living doing so. 

Streaming platforms have, as one Hollywood music supervisor I spoke to put it, invented a new medium and have taken advantage of it to crush royalty payments for composers and are more than happy to fill out their libraries with classic titles that are missing some of the most famous parts of their soundtracks. But streaming is also changing the way music works in new titles, with easier, safer, cheaper song choices being added to TV shows in lieu of anything interesting. As one user on X recently remarked, “it deflates the whole vibe.”

Music rights worked much differently before the age of streaming. According to Nick Audy, a composer who’s worked across film and TV, one of the most famous examples of how royalties used to work was the Seinfeld theme.

It was composed by Jonathan Wolff. He famously wrote different variations of the theme for every episode and opted for a royalty scheme rather than a one-time payout that has added up to millions of dollars a year. Audy says those kinds of deals aren’t happening as often anymore because of streaming platforms changing how syndication works. 

“From what I know, a lot of [composers now] are basically paid out by Netflix and Netflix owns the rights. So, there really isn’t much streaming royalties involved,” he says.

And so, when we talk about the “deflated vibe” of TV and movie soundtracks right now, we’re actually talking about three interlinked issues: how people get paid to score entertainment, how old titles are archived online, and how streaming platforms are scoring new titles. These factors all conspire to bring us a general flattening of the movie soundtrack, and by extension a world where iconic music choices feel even more rare. You still might hear pop songs in your favorite TV shows, but the pool they’re being pulled from is one that’s already been okayed for a global streaming rollout.

Audy tells me that there are essentially two kinds of music you hear in popular entertainment. “Composers, and they will be asked to write a score for a particular film,” he says. “and then there’s other types of music that are like library music or source music, which doesn’t involve a composer at all.”

And the payment and the rights vary for both. But, according to Audy, composers and music supervisors can’t even put pressure on streamers the way writers and actors did last summer during the strikes because there aren’t any unions for the people making the soundtracks for everyone’s favorite shows.

“Our situation is a little bit different. We don’t really have something that we can rally against,” he says. “I’m not really sure when or how we’re all going to get together since there is no fuel to begin with.”

This growing streaming hopelessness for better deals for composers, music supervisors, and musicians—which extends to platforms like Spotify—was recently articulated by Trent Reznor, who does a bit of all three roles.

“We’ve had enough time for the whole ‘All the boats rise’ argument to see they don’t all rise,” Reznor said in a recent GQ interview. Translation: Unlimited, unfettered access to streaming content, whether it’s Spotify or Netflix, is not a good replacement for music royalties. Reznor quit a role at Apple Music over the guilt he said he felt contributing to bottom barrel payments for artists.

While it’s easy to put the entire blame here on streaming platforms, they aren’t the ones that are actually replacing the music on your favorite old TV shows. Jules Zucker, a music supervisor who has worked with VICE News, tells me that any missing music you might encounter in an old show was likely lost years ago because the studio that produced it never imagined the show would need to live forever on a streaming library. Though streamers and studios have been more than happy to avoid fighting to keep those music rights as content has started getting uploaded to the web.

It can also vary country to country. During my Gilmore Girls rewatch, the interstitials sounded weird and certain scenes seemed to reference music that simply wasn’t playing, but, more curiously, the theme song also sounded off. And, according to the extensive rabbit hole I fell down on Reddit, I’m not the only one to notice.

One Reddit thread from last year, titled, “Please tell me it’s not just me whose Netflix changed the Gilmore Girls theme song,” actually helped me figure out what was going on, at least with the Gilmore Girls theme song. The theme is sped up when you watch it on Netflix in South America, and I was watching it in Brazil.

And this is not just an issue for American shows. The Japanese Netflix reality show Terrace House, when watched in Japan, features songs from major artists like Taylor Swift and CHVRCHES. But here in the States, it relies on stock music. All of that comes back to how music rights for the show was originally worked out when it was first created. (I have a friend who was such a massive Terrace House fan that he used to use a VPN to watch the show with its original music.)

“But [studios] couldn’t have known they were going to have to license it in perpetuity for streaming platforms,” Zucker says. “They probably couldn’t afford or didn’t want to front the rest of the money to get the rights they needed to keep that music on a streaming platform.”

Zucker acknowledges that streamers have taken advantage of both composers and music supervisors, but doesn’t think it’s entirely their fault here either. Audiences, too, she says have become accustomed to having all media ever created immediately at their fingertips for a low monthly subscription.

“There’s like a consumption entitlement,” she says. “And it’s getting in the way of anyone and everyone being paid what they’re worth.”

But it’s also affecting the music you hear on new shows. Music writer and cultural critic Sean T. Collins says that most popular shows these days have what he calls the “Memphis needle drop.”

“It’s either sort of goofy anodized modern music,” he says. “Or it is the most screamingly obvious famous song that you can imagine.”

Collins says there’s an art form that has gotten lost over the years, the well-curated TV soundtrack. And while he isn’t ready to put all of the blame at the feet of streamers either, he says he can’t rule it out. The example he points to is the finale of The Sopranos and the use of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing. It’s now one of the most iconic—and, perhaps, controversial—needle drops in television history. But at the time it was not an obvious choice for the scene.

“People don’t believe you now when you say this, no one gave a fuck about Don’t Stop Believing. No one cared,” he says. “Now it’s a classic. And that was The Sopranos that did that.” (People from Boston or New Jersey may argue with that point, but it wasn’t an obvious choice to end a show like The Sopranos.)

Collins doesn’t think shows take that kind of risk anymore, though shows like Euphoria and Fallout suggest the art of the soundtrack hasn’t been completely wiped out yet.

“My suspicion is that the business has been optimized to create a fullness of music,” he says, and we’re speeding toward a future where movie and TV music “almost bypasses human intervention beyond someone just selecting from a curated list.”

Which means it’s possible that when audiences, 25 years from now, are looking up old shows on whatever eventually replaces streaming, they won’t just be unable to find the original versions of classic TV shows. They also won’t remember anything interesting from our current era either.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91109690/why-streaming-platforms-are-scrubbing-the-soundtracks-from-your-favorite-shows?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss

Created 10mo | Apr 22, 2024, 12:40:03 PM


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