Three. Five at the outside, and only when the brief genuinely covers several scenes or moods. One when you are certain it is the song. The instinct to send more is understandable, because every extra track feels like another lottery ticket, but sync pitching does not work that way. A pitch is judged by its weakest track, not its best, so each song you add past three is a fresh opportunity to drag the average down.
There is a second reason, and it is the one that actually decides whether you get a reply. Filtering a catalog is work, and the supervisor sent out a brief specifically so they would not have to do it. A tight pitch of three says you read the brief and made decisions. A pitch of twelve says you pasted your catalog into an email and left the sorting to them. The first one gets listened to. The second one teaches them what your name means in an inbox.
| Pitching to | Send | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A specific brief from a supervisor | 3 | The brief already narrowed it. Your job is to finish the narrowing, not restart it |
| A brief with multiple scenes listed | Up to 5 | Two or three per scene is still too many. One or two per named scene, clearly labelled |
| A cold introduction, no brief | 1 to 2 | You are pitching yourself, not a song. Pick the track that best defines what you do |
| A music library submission | Whatever they ask for | Libraries publish intake rules. Follow them exactly, they are the filter |
| A supervisor who replied and asked for more | 3 to 5 more | An invitation changes the maths. Now volume is welcome, but keep it curated |
Notice that the number only goes up when someone asks. That is the whole rule in one sentence. Until you have a reply, restraint is the signal you are sending.
A supervisor working a brief is not auditioning your artistry, they are filling a specific hole in a specific edit, often against a deadline measured in days. They open submissions in a batch, and on that first pass, assume fifteen to thirty seconds per song. They are listening for tempo, texture, vocal character, and whether the song leaves space for dialogue. They are not waiting for your bridge.
Three practical consequences follow. A song that takes fifty seconds to become itself will be skipped before it becomes itself, so either pitch a version that starts later or do not pitch it here. A dense vocal that never breathes will lose to a sparser song for any scene with talking over it. And the order of your three matters more than you think, because song one sets the expectation for whether songs two and three get played at all.
This is counterintuitive enough to be worth spelling out. If each song has an independent chance of landing, more songs should mean better odds. They do not, for three reasons.
If you are not sure a song fits, that uncertainty is your answer. Cut it. The cost of leaving out a song that might have worked is one missed chance on one brief. The cost of including three that clearly do not is your name becoming a skip.
The hard part is not knowing that three is the number, it is choosing which three out of the fifteen songs in your catalog that plausibly fit. A sequence that works:
Default to a private streaming link with your three songs on one clearly labelled page. Large attachments get bounced by mail servers, and nobody downloads a zip to audition music. Send files when the brief asks for files, or once a song is selected and the production needs broadcast quality WAVs and alternates.
Either way, the filenames and the embedded tags have to be right, because a selected song immediately gets dragged into an editor's folder and lives there without your email around it. Artist, title, BPM, contact and a one-line clearance note should travel inside the file. The ten fields worth filling in are in what metadata your songs need before pitching.
The songs that came fourth and fifth are worth more than they look. When a supervisor likes one of your three, the follow up is often a second scene in the same project, and the writer who can answer in an hour with two more fitting tracks has a real advantage over the writer who has to start searching again. Save the shortlist against the brief, and do not send the extras unsolicited. A follow up email containing four more songs undoes the discipline that got you the reply.
Choosing three is easy once you can see the ranked twenty. The expensive part is retrieval: remembering that you wrote something at 96 BPM in a minor key with a lyric about leaving home, four years ago, in a folder you have not opened since.
Pitchkit indexes a local music folder, reading tempo, key, energy, brightness and danceability straight from the audio, optionally transcribing lyrics with Whisper on your own machine, then ranks your whole catalog against a brief you paste in. You tick the three you want and it copies those exact files into a pitch folder, named and ready. It does not send anything and it does not find briefs. It answers the question of which of your own songs fit the one in front of you.
Related reading: the sync licensing pitch, hour by hour, how to get sync briefs, and how sync placements pay.
Three songs per brief. Send five only when the brief explicitly covers several scenes or moods, and send one when you are genuinely certain it is the song. Supervisors work through submissions in bulk and judge a pitch by its weakest track, not its best, so every extra song you add is a chance to lower the average. A pitch of twelve reads as a catalog dump and signals that you did not do the filtering yourself, which is the work the supervisor was hoping to skip.
Assume fifteen to thirty seconds, and often less on a first pass through a large pile. They are checking tempo, texture, vocal character and whether the song leaves room for dialogue, not following your arrangement to the bridge. This is why the order of your three matters and why a long intro is a liability. If a song takes fifty seconds to become itself, either pitch a version that starts later or do not pitch it for that brief.
Send a private streaming link by default, with one clearly labelled page holding your three songs. Large attachments get blocked by mail servers and nobody downloads a zip to audition music. Send actual files only when the brief or the supervisor asks for them, or once a song has been selected and the production needs broadcast quality WAVs and alternates. Whichever route you use, the filenames and embedded metadata still need to be correct, because that is what survives after the file is dragged into someone else's folder.
Keep them in a note attached to that brief, and do not send them as a follow up unless you are asked. Near misses are the most valuable list you own, because a supervisor who liked one of your three will often come back with a second scene, and you can answer within an hour instead of re-searching your catalog from scratch. If you get a genuine invitation for more, that is when the fourth and fifth songs go out.
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