A sync brief is an invitation with a countdown attached. The supervisor needs a track for a real scene on a real schedule, they sent the brief to more writers than they will answer, and they stop listening once they have what they need. Which means the pitch that arrives Tuesday morning beats the slightly better one that arrives Friday.
So the question this page answers is not "how do I write a beautiful sync pitch." It is: what is the repeatable process that gets a correct, complete pitch out the door in under an hour, every time a brief lands?
Briefs mix requirements with atmosphere. Separate them before you touch your catalog, because the requirements are pass-fail:
Then read the atmosphere: mood words, genre pointers, and above all the artist references, which carry more usable information than the adjectives around them. "Feels like early Bon Iver" specifies tempo, space, production and vocal temperature in four words. How to decode that language in depth: what is a sync brief and how to read one.
Now the bottleneck. You are looking for the songs in your catalog that pass every hard constraint and sit closest to the atmosphere, and you need to trust that you actually surveyed the catalog rather than the ten songs you remember best.
Memory fails here in a specific way: it over-serves whatever you wrote recently and whatever you play often, and neither correlates with fit. The classic sync loss is not rejection; it is remembering the perfect song a week after the deadline. Every working writer with a real catalog has that story.
Whatever your system is, a database, a tagged spreadsheet, or software that indexes audio, the test is the same: given "female vocal, 90 to 100 BPM, hopeful but restrained, no love lyrics," can you produce the true shortlist in minutes? If the answer is no, that is the piece to fix before the next brief, not during it.
Paste the brief as written. Pitchkit scores your whole catalog against it: tempo windows are honored precisely, mood, energy, genre and lyrical themes are read from the audio and transcribed lyrics, and artist references are translated into musical characteristics. You get a ranked shortlist with the reasoning attached, which becomes your one-line-per-song in the email.
It will not source briefs for you and it will not press send. It turns the 20 minute maybe-I-am-forgetting-something scroll into a two minute review of a defensible shortlist.
If your catalog folder already keeps primary masters separated from TV mixes, stems and roughs, this step is minutes. If it does not, fix that once: how to organize a sync catalog.
Brief code in the subject, one-stop status up front, one line per song in the brief's own vocabulary, one link that streams and downloads, offer of alternates, done. The exact structure with copy-paste templates is here: music pitch email templates.
| Mistake | Why it costs |
|---|---|
| Ignoring a hard constraint | A great song outside the tempo window or with forbidden lyrics reads as not having read the brief, which colors how your next pitch is received |
| Volume pitching | Ten songs transfers the filtering to the supervisor, who will not do it. One to three, chosen well, wins |
| Slow response | Briefs are filled on rolling listens. Deadline minus one minute is technically on time and practically late |
| Overclaiming clearance | A placement that dies in clearance burns the relationship that produced the brief |
| No instrumental | The editor needs space for dialogue; no instrumental means finding a different song that has one |
Related: how to find sync placements, how sync placements actually pay, and the four categories of sync licensing software.
Your response to a sync brief: the email or platform submission where you put specific songs of yours forward for a specific placement in film, TV, advertising, games or online video. A complete pitch is one to three songs that answer the brief's constraints, a one-line reason each, playable links or correctly named files, an honest clearance statement, and nothing else.
It is not a bio, a press kit, or a link to your whole catalog. The supervisor described what they need; the pitch demonstrates you read the description.
Same day when possible, and inside the deadline always. Briefs move at production speed: supervisors are often filling a slot within days, they stop reading submissions once they have strong candidates, and a brilliant pitch after the deadline is a pitch into the void.
This is why the bottleneck matters. Writing the email takes ten minutes; knowing which of your songs fit is the slow part, and the writers who answer briefs in an hour are the ones who have solved catalog retrieval, not the ones who type faster.
That one party, ideally you, can clear both sides of the license: the master recording and the publishing (the composition). A supervisor on a deadline strongly prefers one-stop tracks because a single email clears everything, while a song with an uncleared co-writer or a label-owned master can die in clearance even after being chosen.
State it plainly in the pitch if true: one-stop, all splits controlled or agreed. If you have co-writers, agree in advance and in writing that any of you can approve sync placements, or at least know exactly who signs off, so clearance takes hours rather than weeks.
Effectively yes. Dialogue sits where vocals sit, so editors routinely cut between the vocal and instrumental versions of the same track, and many briefs ask for instrumentals outright. A vocal-only submission is often set aside on that ground alone.
Bounce an instrumental for every song you consider pitchable, keep it alongside the master with a consistent name, and mention its existence in the pitch. Clean intros and endings and a version without long ambient tails help for the same reason: they make the editor's job easier.
One to three, each with a one-line reason tied to the brief's own language. Supervisors listen in seconds-long passes; three targeted options respect that, while ten options ask the supervisor to do your filtering, which loses to the writer who did it themselves.
If the brief is broad, pick the three that hit the hard constraints first: tempo range, duration, lyric restrictions, clearance requirements. A song that misses a hard constraint is not a submission, it is noise, however good it is.
It compresses the slow middle of the process. You paste the brief text as written, and Pitchkit scores your entire catalog against it: tempo ranges are honored precisely, mood, genre, energy and lyrical themes are matched from the audio itself, and artist references are translated into musical characteristics rather than matched as words.
The result is a ranked shortlist with reasoning, which becomes your one-line-per-song in the pitch email, and one click copies your picks into a folder named Artist - Title, ready to upload. The free version indexes your first 100 songs with every feature working; $49 once removes the cap. It runs locally on your Mac and does not supply briefs.
The free version is the whole Mac app with the catalog capped at 100 songs: brief matching, artist references, lyric transcription and pitch folders all included. No account, no card, no expiry. $49 once removes the cap.
Download free: 100 songs →