Sync Licensing

How to Pitch Music for Sync Licensing: The Practical Guide

8 min read · musicpitchkit.com

Pitching music for sync licensing sounds complicated, but the mechanics are straightforward: a music supervisor or library sends out a brief describing what they need, and you send back the songs from your catalog that best fit that description. The quality of your pitches, how well your songs match the brief, determines your placement rate.

This guide covers the full workflow: from getting access to briefs, to reading them correctly, to building a pitch folder and sending it. It also covers the tools that make each step faster.

Step 1: Get Access to Briefs

You can't pitch sync if you don't receive briefs. The main ways songwriters get access:

Music libraries, Libraries accept submissions and send briefs to their roster. Non-exclusive libraries like Pond5 let you license the same tracks elsewhere; curated libraries like Musicbed and Artlist typically require exclusivity for the tracks they accept, so read the agreement before you sign. Good for volume, lower per-placement fees.
Sync agents, Work with a sync agent who pitches your catalog on your behalf. Better per-placement fees, harder to get into.
Direct relationships, Build relationships with music supervisors directly. Highest upside, takes years.
Licensing platforms, MusoSoup, Groover, and others facilitate brief-based pitching for independent artists.
Publisher briefs, If you're signed to a publisher, they forward briefs from their supervisor network.

Start with non-exclusive libraries and build from there. Exclusivity trades upside for volume, understand what you're signing before you commit.

Step 2: Read the Brief Correctly

Most briefs are misread or underparsed, which leads to off-target pitches and wasted relationships. Here's what to extract from every brief:

Identify hard filters first

BPM range, vocal gender, instrumental vs. vocal, lyric restrictions ("no profanity," "no religious themes"). Eliminate anything that fails a hard filter before you consider fit.

Decode the artist references

"Sounds like early Adele" means piano-led, powerful female vocal, emotionally raw ballad, lyric-forward. Translate every artist reference into sonic and thematic descriptors before matching against your catalog.

Match on lyric theme, not just sound

A brief asking for "hope and resilience" will reject a perfectly-produced song about heartbreak. Lyric theme is the filter most songwriters miss. Read the lyric summary requirements as seriously as the tempo.

Note the deadline and context

Sync briefs move fast, often 24-48 hour turnarounds. Know the placement context (ad, trailer, TV) because that affects energy and production level requirements.

Step 3: Search Your Catalog

This is where most songwriters lose the most time and leave the most placements on the table. If you're pitching from memory or browsing folders manually, you're not seeing your full catalog, you're seeing whatever's top of mind.

The practical approach depends on your catalog size:

Under 50 songs: A tagged spreadsheet (BPM, energy, mood, lyric theme) is enough. Filter manually.
50-200 songs: A catalog platform like Disco with consistent tagging. Manual filtering still works but gets slow.
200+ songs: You need brief matching software. Searching manually through 300+ songs under a 24-hour deadline means you're pitching your most memorable songs, not your most relevant ones.

The 200-song threshold, Once your catalog passes about 200 songs, manual brief matching stops working. The cognitive load of cross-referencing tempo + mood + lyric theme + vocal type across hundreds of tracks is too high under deadline. This is when a music pitching tool becomes essential, not optional.

Step 4: Build a Pitch Folder

A pitch folder is a set of audio files, typically 3-5 songs, properly named and ready to upload or share. Standard naming: Artist Name - Song Title.mp3. Some supervisors want WAVs; check the brief's technical requirements.

Pick 3-5 songs maximum, more is not better. Quality of fit matters, not quantity.
Name files consistently: Artist - Title.wav or Artist - Title.mp3
Include stems or instrumentals if the brief asks for them
If using Disco, share a link rather than files where possible, it's more professional and trackable

Step 5: Send the Pitch

Keep your submission message short. The music does the work. A one-to-two sentence note that references the brief ("Pitching for the summer campaign brief, these four tracks match the 100-120 BPM, upbeat, outdoor adventure brief") is all you need. No paragraph of context about yourself.

The Music Pitching Tools That Make This Faster

The two tools that reduce pitch turnaround time the most for working songwriters:

Disco, for outbound catalog sharing and supervisor discovery. Upload once, share everywhere.
Pitchkit, for inbound brief matching. Paste any brief, get your best-matching songs ranked instantly, create a pitch folder in one click. Mac app, $39 one-time.

Together they cover the full cycle: being found by supervisors (Disco) and responding fast when briefs come in (Pitchkit).

Try it on your own catalog

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 songs

Frequently asked

How many songs should you send in a sync pitch?

Three to five, each with one line about why it fits. Sending twenty signals that you couldn't judge your own catalog and moves the filtering work onto a supervisor who will simply not do it.

This is exactly why catalog retrieval matters. Sending three songs is only good advice if they're the right three, and picking the right three out of nine hundred from memory isn't something anyone does well under a deadline.

How fast do you need to respond to a sync brief?

Faster than feels comfortable. Many briefs run on windows of days, sometimes hours, and supervisors frequently stop looking once they have enough strong options, so a great pitch that lands on day four can lose to a good one that landed on day one.

That's the argument for having your catalog indexed before a brief arrives rather than after. The work of knowing what you have doesn't get faster under pressure; it just gets skipped.

What should you actually write in a pitch email?

Short and specific. Name the brief, list the songs with one line each on why they fit, tempo, mood, theme, whichever constraint the brief stated, and make the files easy to open. That's it.

What doesn't help: your credits, praise for the project, or a long preamble. The person reading is comparing your five songs against fifty other writers' five songs, and the fastest way to be memorable is to have obviously read the brief.