NEW! Tool To Get Your Music In TV & Movies

Why I've Never Talked About Sync Licensing (Until Now)

I get asked constantly: Jesse, you have 900 videos — why haven't you made one about how musicians get sync placements? How do you get your music in TV shows, movies, or a Lexus commercial?

And here's something most people don't realize: sync is actually the number one way songs go mega viral — way more reliably than blowing up on TikTok or Reels when it comes to real streaming movement. Land a spot in a movie or TV show, and for years to come, every time someone discovers it and Shazams your track, you get streams, a potential new fan, and oh yeah — a fee they paid you upfront to use the song, plus royalties. It's no wonder everyone asks about it.

So why haven't I covered it? Like a lot of topics, I've skipped across 900 videos, it's because there was never a good answer for smaller artists without representation. That's changed now, so let's get into it. By the end of this, you'll know how to submit your music to movies and TV shows — and what to actually write to get placed.

Why I Stayed Away

It's not like I don't know this space. I've been part of a production team that landed syncs in deeply cursed shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Bad Girls Club. If you watch the last season of Sex Lives of College Girls and wait for a kegger scene, you can actually hear me yelling in a gang vocal: "Put them hands high." I find myself doing very strange things in music every day.

The point is, I know a lot about sync — enough to have been part of some of the top placements you can get. I've watched the Shazams roll in and seen what happens to the streams. And most importantly, I've seen the dumb ways my boys and I spent the sync check when it cleared, because for some reason, no musician is capable of spending one responsibly.

So why didn't I tell you sooner? Because this part of the music business is especially full of predators. Scammers with courses, lists of music supervisors that do nothing for you, insane submission fees going to a PayPal account, while the person does nothing. I've always taken the stance that it's better to stay quiet until I have something actually useful to say.

The Myth That's Holding You Back

A lot of you always assumed I didn't cover sync because there's no space for artists with little to no monthly listeners. That's not even a little true and never has been.

The production crew I wrote with had zero audience before people heard the songs on those shows. Never made a video, never promoted a song, never bought an ad, never performed live. They may have made a single post the day an album dropped, and that's questionable for some of the members. Nobody was interested in promoting it — everyone had other priorities, so why push it when the music was already doing its job of getting placements?

If you Shazam songs on shows and movies regularly, you've probably gotten mad about this. "WTF — I have more monthly listeners than this artist, and they're on Love RV?" There's a real reason for that, and once you understand it, the whole thing makes sense.

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How the Budget Works (and Why That's Your Opening)

Shows like Love Island or the Sharknado franchise, my wife enjoys having a mix of big artists and nobody artists in the same project — and it comes down to budget. Every music supervisor has a number to work with. When the director is hyped as hell for the action scene and insists on Skrillex's "Bangarang," the supervisor pays for it. Skrillex needs a new razor for his sideburns, and they're gonna cover it because the director insists.

Now the supervisor has a problem. They blew a chunk of the budget, they've got four needle drops left, and they can't pay major artists what they're going to demand. The editor has been cutting to AFI's "I Wanna Mohawk (But Mom Won't Let Me Get One)" — a punk classic — and now the budget can't cover it. AFI isn't doing the bargain bin. So the supervisor calls up a friend who knows punk and says, "I need a soundalike with the same vibe."

That friend pulls up a cold email they got a while back from some band with a banger in the same lane. The supervisor sees the band has 300 monthly listeners, knows he can clear the song for what's left in the budget, and your track ends up in the movie forever — in the scene where the punk kid jumps off a Tesla diner and smashes a Cybertruck.

I managed a punk band that got placed in a show almost exactly like this. I've helped other artists navigate nearly identical situations on consulting calls. It's real. Sometimes the budget opening is for an artist with 600 monthly listeners, sometimes 600,000.

The Tool That Makes This Accessible

The issue has always been getting on the radar of the right music supervisors in the first place — and that's where SyncPlacement.com comes in. It's from the same team behind PlaylistSupply, RadioPromo.IO, and BookingAgent.io — people with roots in artist management, booking, music marketing, and catalog research, which is why the tool is actually easy to use. T

The problem they set out to solve is one everyone in this space hits: great music was being pitched without a clear strategy, solid targeting, or reliable contact info. The issue usually wasn't the music — it was the research. Too much time spent digging through IMDb, chasing outdated lists, and reaching out to the wrong people, often scammers charging insane fees on top of it.

SyncPlacement turns real placement history into practical outreach lists. And what makes it stand out from everything else I've seen is the price. Scammers were charging $1,000 for outdated lists of dead emails. SyncPlacement starts at $30/month, or $25/month on a yearly plan.

SyncPlacement works by letting you search for artists who sound like you and showing you the supervisors who placed them. You pick a mood and genre, the tool surfaces artists who've landed placements in that lane, and from there you can pull contact info on the supervisors behind those placements — emails, LinkedIn profiles, company info. You can save contacts into organized projects so your outreach stays sorted by sound or target. The whole point is that instead of cold-guessing who to pitch, you're starting from real placement history and working backwards to the exact people who have already proven they work in your world.

What to Write

Finding the right music supervisors is half the battle. The other half is not blowing it with a bad pitch. Being accurate and informative is what actually helps you. If you tell a supervisor your music is perfect for a cosmic, trippy scene — Pink Floyd energy — and it's actually slacker rock that sounds like you're sunk in a couch, you've wasted both of your time. But if you say you're perfect for a montage with people flying between clubs, you've just described a problem a lot of supervisors need to solve.

Keep the email to three short paragraphs, total length under 150 words, scannable in 30 seconds on a phone screen.

Paragraph one is a brief intro that shows you're not carpet bombing every supervisor on the internet. One sentence on who you are and your genre, then a specific reference to their work — a recent placement, a show they worked on, a season they just wrapped. Every supervisor claims they ignore anything without personalization, and they're not lying.

Paragraph two has your streaming link and a one-line description of what you're sending. Curate one to three tracks maximum, tailored to that supervisor's specific projects. If you don't have a song suited to a real use case — a romantic scene, a fight sequence, something specific — you're probably wasting both of your time.

Paragraph three states your clearance status: Do you have a publishing deal or a record deal that would need to be cleared through a label? A lot of supervisors are working with a 24-48 hour window when a song falls through. Not having a label or a publishing deal where you've signed away rights is actually a major selling point. After that, thank them, leave your email and phone number. That's it. No life story, no career timeline, no request for feedback. Definitely no story about how Kevin and James have been playing music together since they met at McSnoody's Tavern.

On following up, I've found it to be useless. If they liked your vibe, they saved it. If they didn't, it went in the trash. Try again a month or two later with a different song, or when you have something better suited to their projects. o get SyncPlacement.com best deal use the link they made for my viewers by going to https://syncplacement.com/jessecannon