Library Music

Library music (production music) is functional music written, recorded and licensed in pre-cleared form for use in film, television, advertising, news, sports and radio. Tracks are short (typically two to four minutes), genre-explicit (jazz, funk, lounge, rock, electronic, action, suspense, etc.) and frontloaded — the genre tag is established in the first few seconds so that an editor can grab the cue and drop it under picture. Catalogue houses like KPM, De Wolfe, Bruton, Chappell and Sonoton commissioned working studio musicians to produce hundreds of tracks per year, supplied as LPs marked 'not for sale' and distributed to broadcasters. Production values were high — these were professional sessions with the same players who recorded pop hits.

The format grew with the post-1950s expansion of broadcast television and advertising, particularly in the UK, where KPM (Keith Prowse Music) and De Wolfe ran the dominant catalogues. The 1960s and 70s were the golden age — KPM's 'green sleeve' LP series, recorded mostly at the company's London studios by working session musicians including Alan Hawkshaw, Keith Mansfield, Brian Bennett and Alan Tew, produced thousands of cues that ended up on British television. The library cue 'Heavy Action' (Johnny Pearson, 1971) is widely known as the theme to ABC's Monday Night Football. Beginning in the 1990s, DJs and hip-hop producers — Madlib, J Dilla, the Avalanches — rediscovered the catalogues as a sampling goldmine, and reissues turned formerly anonymous library tracks into cult listening.

Library tracks compress whole genres into thirty-second bursts: a funk track will set up the drums, bass and horns in the first measure and ride that pocket for two minutes without singer or solo. Listen for the lack of vocals — most production music skips lyrics so it can sit unobtrusively under voiceover — and for the way breaks (drum-only passages) are deliberately built in so editors can drop dialogue over them.

Alan Hawkshaw's 'The Champ' (1968, KPM), one of the most-sampled cues in hip-hop history, is a defining entry. Brian Bennett's 'Chase Side Shoot Up' (1979) shows the action-suspense end of the catalogue; Keith Mansfield's 'Funky Fanfare' is the 1970s movie-trailer sound in distilled form.

Library music's anonymity was partly contractual — composers were paid up front and signed over the rights — and partly aesthetic, since the catalogues sold genre-by-the-minute rather than star personality. The recent vinyl reissue boom (Music De Wolfe, KPM, Bruton) has finally restored composer credits and made cult heroes of musicians whose names didn't appear on most broadcasts they soundtracked.