If you're pitching for sync, the brief is everything. It's the document that tells you what a music supervisor, ad agency, or library needs, and your job is to figure out which of your songs fits best.
The problem is briefs aren't standardized. Some are one sentence. Some are two pages. Learning to read them quickly, and match your catalog to them accurately, is the skill that separates working sync writers from everyone else.
Most briefs contain some combination of these elements:
If you have 50 songs, manual matching is manageable. If you have 300, 500, or 1,000+ songs, it becomes impossible under deadline pressure. Most songwriters with large catalogs pitch from memory and habit, and miss songs they wrote two years ago that would have been perfect.
The solution is software that indexes your catalog and can read a brief the way a human would, understanding artist references, lyric themes, mood descriptors, and surface your best matches automatically.
Pitchkit indexes your first 30 songs free, the whole Mac app, every feature, no account and no card. Paste any brief and it ranks your catalog by fit. $39 once removes the cap.
Download free trial: 30 songsReading briefs well is a skill. The more briefs you read, the faster you get at identifying what actually matters versus filler language. The more your catalog is organized and searchable, the faster you can respond. The songwriters who win at sync aren't the ones who write the most, they're the ones who match the right song to the right brief, quickly and consistently.
A sync brief is a written description of the music a project needs, sent by a music supervisor, agency or publisher. It typically states the project type, a mood or emotional arc, sometimes a tempo range or key, occasionally a duration, and very often one or more artist references standing in for a whole production world.
Briefs aren't standardised. Two supervisors describing the same need will write completely different documents, which is why decoding them quickly is a skill rather than a lookup.
Separate the hard constraints from the soft ones. Tempo ranges, key, duration, instrumental versus vocal and explicit genre are non-negotiable and easy to check, songs outside a stated tempo window usually get dismissed regardless of quality. Mood words, artist references and theme are softer and reward judgement.
Take the artist references more seriously than the adjectives. Adjectives are frequently borrowed from a client deck and mean less than they appear to; a reference artist carries tempo range, production palette, vocal register and lyrical stance all at once.
They're shorthand for a set of musical characteristics the writer of the brief couldn't be bothered to spell out, or couldn't articulate. 'Something like Phoebe Bridgers' is communicating tempo, instrumentation, vocal delivery, production space and lyrical register in three words.
The practical move is to translate the reference into those concrete characteristics before you go looking, rather than searching your memory for songs that 'feel like' that artist. That translation step is exactly what software can do quickly and memory does badly.