Landing a sync placement on Love Island allows you to reach a wide audience, generating new listeners which could ultimately turn into new fans and have a significant impact on your music royalties and career overall.
Track Relevancy
We tend to pitch for the show between May (pre show) all the way through the season up until the end of July. Our clients favour new released tracks so the more contemporary the better. If you are a Love Island fan, then you will know the generic timeline of the series as islanders are challenged, meeting each other’s families and going on extremely romantic dates. All these key milestones of the series require lyrically and tonely relevant tracks. I am not saying go and write a song called ‘Casa Amor’ about deception and tests but if any of your tracks incorporate heartbreak, forgiveness and saying goodbye this might just work in your favour. There will be plenty of moments of love, togetherness, summer memories and new found friends throughout the entire series so we are basically looking for thematically fitting tracks!
Knowing your Rights Holders
It may sound pretty obvious but ensuring you know the other people who share rights on the track, their contact details and their publishing entities. For clearing any sync (from TV placements to a feature in a film) this information can be vital with quick turnarounds. Therefore, it is necessary to know both master and publishing details to ensure music supervisors will be able to contact the correct people for any information they require. For example, if a writer is currently unpublished or hasn’t registered their share, having details to hand can massively help speed up the process. Which leads us on perfectly to the next tip.
Blanket Agreement
In order to get your music synced on UK TV, you need to make sure your music is correctly registered with PRS and MCPS (Sentric do this for you automatically when you register) which covers your publishing copyrights and also with PPL (we also have a Neighbouring Rights team to help with this) covering your master copyright. It is important that every writer on the track is published or has registered their share of the copyright properly with PRS/MCPS otherwise it goes into something called ‘Copyright Control’ that no precise ownership has been registered. Whilst in ‘Copyright Control’ no TV programme or broadcaster will ever use that song. Even if it’s just 1% of the song! This process can be very time consuming and could mean opportunities to get your tracks placed on the show could be missed, if you want to ensure you have the best chance of getting a track featured then this is a great tip.
Provide Instrumentals
When recording a new track you should be creating an instrumental version at the same time. Be sure to agree this with the studio/engineer at the beginning of your session as they might charge you a little bit extra. This is very important because often throughout the show when tracks are used – for example around the ‘firepit’ – there will be voice overs as the islanders talk and reveal who they would like to re-couple with. Therefore, we always like to provide our clients with instrumental versions of the tracks so they can use them during these tense and iconic scenes.
Shazam
Love Island is the UK’s most Shazamed soundtrack! We have seen our featured tracks stay in the Top 5 in the Shazam Charts a week after the episode was aired. In order to ensure your tracks are on Shazam you will need a music distributor. You can then link streaming platforms whereby people can go and stream the track with the click of a button and boost your streaming figures. Artists can also access insights that allow them to see some information and figures about who Shazamed their track which can be beneficial for artists.
Good luck!
The Sentric Sync Team