The secret soundtrack to your life

0:02You know this piece of music, right? You know from where it originates? Except I'm 99.999 % sure you don't. It's called Frolic, and it's composed by Luciano Michelini. Luciano wrote Frolic in the 1970s for an Italian film called La Bellissima Estate, or The Beautiful Summer. From there, it was added to various music libraries and ended up being used in lots of commercials here in the U.S. One day, Larry David saw one such commercial for a bank. He liked the music, filed it away, and when it came time to pick a theme song for his HBO comedy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, he chose Frolic. And from there, it became the soundtrack to a million memes, shorthand for walking yourself into an especially awkward or embarrassing situation.

0:45Frolic might be the most famous piece of what is sometimes called library music, background music, sync music, or just sync. And on Today Explained, we are living in peak sync.

1:03Today Explained. My name is Ryan Francis Bradley. I am a writer, mostly for the New York Times Magazine, mostly these days about music. And you recently went on a little journey with a branch of music called Sync Music. Where did it begin? Right. So it began, as things do, with my wife and I watching Love Island. Tonight.

1:32There was this song that came on that sounded like a pop song. It was a pop song. Twisted nightmare All my love's lost in your sin But it was like very weirdly specific to the moment in Love Island And I was like, what is this song? Take my heart, throw it away Make me hate all the games we play As one does, I like pulled out Shazam on my phone And tried to Shazam it and nothing came up And I was like, that's strange and I did some little digging around various streaming services and like just tried to search the lyrics and couldn't find it. Found a Reddit thread about other people asking about this song.

2:19What the song that starts to play when they call up the ladies? And Austin gets the first text. Shazam, Google, and ChatGPT fail-pane. I was like, what is this song? And then I just started calling people and asking them about what this was. And then I found this whole world of sync music. Did you ever find out what the song was? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a song called Love's a War.

2:51Okay, you hear this song, Love is a War, while watching Love Island with your wife. You end up going on this whole journey and discover a whole world of music called sync. Tell us about sync. I like to say sync is a genre described by its function. So it kind of contains all genres, all sounds in music, but its function, right, is to always be paired to video. So it can sound wildly different. And I mean, the best way to think about sync isn't just in the song, the kind of pop songs you hear in reality TV. My diamond earring came off in the ocean and it's gone. Again, there's people that are dying.

3:31Tell Amanda to call me. I'll give her all the dirt on set me.

3:39The music you hear behind tutorials on YouTube or TikTok.

3:52These very kind of cliche sounds, and there's trends, right? I would say in the sort of late 2010s, a big sound in this sort of background to video sync was like ukulele, sort of indie pop sound.

4:13And now it's become a lot more kind of electronic. There's this great playlist a friend and a very friend of mine sent. It's called like music for corporate and technology. that's just like kind of electronica, kind of soft electronica to back behind like corporate videos.

4:35You know, sync often follows trends in the mainstream music. Like a lot of pop now is a bit more electronic than it is ukulele. Thank God. We use music in the background of our interviews and in our billboards at the top of the show. And most often it's made by an alien known as the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Hi, it's me, Breakmaster Cylinder. Is that sync music? I would say so. I mean, if he's making it to be paired to audio, which, I mean, that's the beginning of sync, right? The roots of sync have this purpose-built music for radio. For a long time, it was called library music and it still is sometimes called library music or production music.

5:23A lot of the library music that was made in the 60s and 70s and a little bit in the 80s when there were a lot more musicians, on-staff studio musicians. And when they weren't sitting around making a record for artists, they would make library music.

5:45And Caesar sees it.

5:58And so there's really amazing, like this is kind of Crate Diggers' gold mines of all of this music that was made by really serious, amazing musicians. making music to sit in a library and potentially get picked up and used in a TV show or commercial. Nowadays, that whole ecosystem where you would have on-staff studio musicians is pretty rare. Someone who just hangs out at a studio and is like a hand for whatever anyone needs on a given day. Yeah, and that's like a 9-to-5 job. I mean, the vast majority of musicians are independent contractors. And so early on in my reporting, I was talking to a musician who is 9 to 5.

6:42He's an embedded contractor, and his 9 to 5 is making sync music. And he described it to me. I was like, I'm so interested in exploring this kind of corner of the music industry. And he's like, let me stop you there, man. This is the music industry. For a lot of us, this is how we make it work. Does that mean that in some ways, considering how much video we consume right now, that we're sort of in the era of, I don't know, peak sync? I would say so. I mean, certainly in terms of the number of tracks available and the number of tracks that are being made, I think there's a whole lot of young people trying to break in to sync and make a living that way.

7:27There are also very serious record producers who describe to me sync as their 401k. It's like their retirement plan because they can steadily make sync music and then still be waiting for that, you know, once or twice a year working on a big record and having a big payday. And with the like omnipresence of sync music in our current day, is it affecting what pop music sounds like? So I sort of think so. What was really interesting to me was that because we live in this age where we're drowning in video and a lot of people encounter new songs through video platforms, video forward platforms, a lot of the tricks of sync have influenced how pop music is made in a way.

8:22I mean, there's this interesting kind of gray area between what is a sync track and what is a pure pop song. And what is working for pop often now has a lot of, is kind of borrowing a lot of the moves from sync, where you have these instrumental breaks between lyrics and you have this like orchestral build. One of the most successful sync tracks last year, which is just kind of based off of how often it was used to back videos on TikTok and also in commercials.

8:58Zara Larson, by a lot of metrics, the kind of the biggest sync track of 2025. And I think that she very cannily is putting out music that works really well with video. And, you know, whether or not she's... I think it's fair to say that she set out to make a really successful pop song and did. And part of its success, a large part of its success, I would say, is that it works really well with video, that it builds orchestrally, that it has these nice instrumental breaks to lyrics and is picking up a lot of the tricks that sync music producers have long used, like having a longer instrumental intro and a longer instrumental outro and making sure that it builds and it has these big hits and these like breaks.

10:02Right? There's like a, there's a very interesting thing I would say in pop now where big pop songs really need a like 15 to 30 second moment that like really works on video. And that is what, where it gets used on TikTok. and that is how it becomes a hit. Oh, it's starting to sound sad, Ryan. You know... Like, this is really good for musicians because it helps them pay the bills, but is it flattening music? Man, I'm of two minds about this. I think you can get depressed about how music, where music is today and how it's starting to sound the same. I feel on the other hand, I'm kind of like, music has always reflected where culture is, and music has always tried to, musicians have always tried to craft songs that are going to be wildly popular and get heard.

10:59And if this is the way to do it, then so be it. I will say after reporting this, look, I'm a middle-aged music snob, and a lot of this stuff I was a little snooty about going into the reporting. And then, no surprise, you get into it, and you talk to the people behind these tracks, and you see that they're coming at it with real intent and real interest, and the real human thing that makes music interesting to other humans, and it became a lot more interesting to me. And it made me understand pop music that I was a little dismissive of a little bit better. and appreciate it a little bit more. Oh my gosh, we didn't do the thing.

11:45The elephant in the room. There is a major elephant in the room, a thing you cannot pay. But it's like, no, I'm here, and I'm here to stay, and I'm here to F your S up, and that elephant, of course, is artificial intelligence. Of course, of course.

12:06The elephant, when Today Explained, returns.

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14:23ShipStation.com today. Like a boat.

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15:41Vo Williams is a certified sync musician. We asked him if that was like a thing he dreamt of doing when he was growing up. No, no. Actually, it was completely by accident. You know, my career was on that very, like, traditional trajectory, making music, trying to make a hit song, get on the radio, blow up like that, you know? And, you know, I said yes to a music session one day, and that session ended up being the first song that I ever had placed on television. What was it called and where did it get placed? Yeah, so the song is actually called Light Em Up. it's been placed in over 700 to 800 different things yeah so yeah so um the way that i even the way that i discovered that i was even doing this because in the beginning i didn't even know i was i was being making sync music i was just making this hybrid uh form of uh hip-hop which we call epic hip-hop today okay um with us with us being the pioneers of that of that actual genre but I had no idea that it would be considered kind of like the cornerstone of the way hip-hop sounds in sync.

16:53My music is meant to drive stadiums, to resonate across arenas and baseball fields. It's meant to like, you know, you need like your biggest star of the year jumping out of a helicopter and it explodes and then my song carries the weight. I'm coming for payback.

17:16Give us some specifics. Where have people potentially heard your music, this song or others? If you watched the 2024 Olympics, the Italian women's gymnastics team did their bronze medal winning routine to my song Greatness.

17:39If you went to the Super Bowl, you may have heard my song Underlay. So when they did the big presentation for the second half of the Super Bowl, my song Andele was ringing out in the stadium and all of the media was cut to that song Andele if you went to the Super Bowl this past year.

18:03So Bad Bunny kind of opened up for you at the Super Bowl? Yeah, I don't know if Bad Bunny stuck around after performing to hear Andele. If you've been to a Lakers game in the past couple years, if you've been to a Tampa Bay Lightning game, Milwaukee Bucks, I had the season anthem for their championship winning year and also performed live in the finals when they won the championship. I literally could go on and on, man. I mean, the music is everywhere. When one of your songs gets placed 700, 800 times, how much money do you make? Oh, wait.

18:43I think right now I have well over 3 ,000 individual syncs, right? So that's the license. That's like, okay, we're going to use your song, you know, name a TV show, right? We're going to use your song in your favorite TV show. Heated Rivalry. Okay, we're going to use your song in Heated Rivalry, right? I'm coming to the cottage. That counts as one. That doesn't mean that it's only been seen one time, right? It could air until infinity. So each time that it actually shows or each time that it airs, I get paid on the back end through what's called the performance rights organization. And that's your check in the mail, right?

19:21It's a little less predictable in terms of the rates. You know, you're happy to get it. And that's your royalty check that you get every quarter. Also on the front end, in order for them to use our music, that is valued at a sync fee rate. Those can vary anywhere between, you know, 10 ,000 to 500 ,000, depending on the type of uses and how they want to move forward with that. OK, so you do all right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm blessed for sure. Yeah. Praise God.

19:53We've established that this was not what you set out to do. However, it's where you ended up and it's been real good to you. But we've talked on this show about how AI is making it so much easier for people to create their own music with a simple prompt. Music creation, songwriting in a way, has been cheapened. You're right. We're in a revolutionary moment. This is the steam engine. This is the wheel. This is fire. This is the internet, right? And I would say that, I would say for me, the feeling is no fear. I absolutely have zero fear about AI. Zero? And I have zero fear. That blows my mind, though, because if I go to Suno and I say, Suno, give me an epic rap song.

20:44I go to some library and I look up Bo Williams' epic rap song.

20:53You know the difference. Maybe I know the difference. But like 99 % of humanity probably doesn't know the difference because as you've laid out here, this is going on some bumper at the Super Bowl or in the background of some commercial or, you know, behind some TV show where something else is happening. And you don't feel any fear that this might put you out of work one day? No, sir. The reason why I don't fear it is because, and yes, I agree, most likely technology will advance to a level where the AI music is so natural sounding. A music bed, something that is like, you know, it doesn't really have any value.

21:33They just need some music right there. It's going to be tough. That part of the industry is going to get challenged. And it's going to be about stepping it up. There's no more artists that we made a lot of money. Sometimes 10%, 15 % of our catalog was us just dialing it in to fulfill some corporate-like, emotionless-like music bed part or bumper part. That part is going to get challenged. So what's going to have to happen is musicians are going to have to step up and get even better, get even more creative, become even more amazing. It's an incredible opportunity for the tide to rise and for us to have to get up and work out.

22:15Now we got to work out. We can't lay around anymore. And it's not only is it a good thing for us as individual artists, because now we have to try and we have to think and we have to get creative again, right? But it's a great thing for music and music listeners, because now you're going to have this renaissance of artists who are just trying to do something so fresh that a data set doesn't have it yet. If you have the most advanced technology, the most advanced music AI come out tomorrow, 100 % of that music will always be behind me because that music is built on a data set and data is the past.