‘The revolution in music consumption has really pushed sync up the industry’s agenda.’

Research suggests that both employer and prospective employee pretty much know the outcome of a job interview within the first two minutes.

You could forgive Tim Miles quite a bit of room for doubt, however, when one of three sentences he heard within that time frame, when being quizzed by Warner Music’s Rich Robinson 15 years ago was, ‘I can’t believe you’re selling carrots!’.

But, whilst it might not have been as definitively indicative as, say, ‘When can you start?’, it did at least make sense, having followed ‘Didn’t you used to be
in Royworld?’ and ‘So, what are you doing now?’

Royworld, as any especially dedicated connoisseurs of noughties indie pop might remember, were signed to Virgin, released an album called Man In The Machine [2008] and supported Guillemots before getting dropped and splitting up. Only true fans will remember the keyboard player as being one Tim Miles.

Well, maybe true fans and people who’d worked in sync at EMI [then the fourth major and owner of Virgin]. Especially only one year after they had parted ways. And, yes, in that year Miles had started working at a greengrocer’s.

He recalls: “At that point I still hadn’t really grasped what sync was, but I recognised the name of the recruiting manager, Rich Robinson, who’s now the EVP of Sync at Warner Chappell. When he found out what I was doing, he pretty much offered me the job on the spot. I think he felt bad!”

It definitely wasn’t a pure pity hire, however, as, apart from a brief stint away at Faber & Faber focused on composer management, Miles has risen and risen through the sync ranks (joining Warner in the process as part of the divestment that took place after Universal bought EMI in 2012].

“In 2018, Rich left to join Warner Chappell and I was given the opportunity to lead the team here in the UK, for which I’m grateful to Peter Breeden [then Warner Music UK COO] and Tony Harlow [Chairman & CEO, Warner Music UK]. Rich had done an incredible job and it was a tough act to follow.

“Then we shook the business up a few years ago when we globalised sync and they moved me into a European-focused role. As of a few weeks ago my remit expanded again, which is amazing. I continue to report to Ron Broitman in LA, who leads the global team, but my new role has an increased focus on growing our businesses across Africa, Middle East, Latin America and Asia.”

It’s also the reason, after a long flight and no sleep, he is talking to MBW from a hotel in India. There’s no sign of jet lag, however, as Miles talks about his decade-and-a-half in sync, the most significant recent changes and where the sector is heading…

Can you tell us about the make-up of your team as of now, and maybe what that says about the nature of not just your set-up, but also the changing role and prominence of sync as a sector?

When I started in sync, way back in 2008, we were still very much a back-office department. We were kind of rooted in the Legal/BA division, or the Finance division. And most of the people we had in the team, I think it was five at the time, were immersed in doing administration.

That’s been flipped on its head. Of the 10 people in the UK, for example, eight of them are creative. We’ve also looked to hire specialists, which I think has made a difference. We’ve got a chap called Rob Vicars, for example, who joined the team five years ago, who’s a gaming specialist. Similarly, we’ve recently created a Global Curator role based out of London, which sees Liam Klimek [ex-Boiler Room] help surface the best sync songs from around our global teams.

“We’re now set up to be more curious and open-minded as a department.”

We’ve tried to break the mould by not hiring traditional sync people, but looking for people that can talk the language of the clients who want to buy and use our music.

We’re now set up to be more curious and open-minded as a department. I like people to challenge the norms. Because the sync industry is quite traditional and often people still don’t understand how it works. Other departments perhaps just expect syncs to happen, or they don’t understand the nuances around the types of music that gets picked.

So I’ve tried to reinvent how we do business, as well as how we communicate internally, and that’s been quite fruitful.

What does creativity mean within sync?

I suppose what I mean is what I like to call a sync 3.0 mindset.

Basic sync is when the phone rings, it’s a film producer, they want to buy a Led Zeppelin track and we tell them what it costs. It’s arm’s length and procedural.

Most sync teams have moved on from there and are in the next stage. We know curation is key and knowing our catalogue is crucial.

So the phone does ring, but they don’t know what song they want. They’ve got a scene, they’ve got these characters, there’s an emotion they want to get across and there’s a budget. We’re very good at surfacing the right music quickly.

The 3.0 mindset is more about knocking on doors and being courageous enough to say to an ad agency or a gaming company or a film company, ‘Hey, we’re Warner Music, I don’t know what you’re working on, but this is what we have’ or, ‘We’ve got this great idea’ or, ‘This artist has come to us and said they want to write a song about this kind of subject. We love this show, we love you as a director, can we work together?’

I would imagine one of the most satisfying elements of your role is breaking new artists. Is that still a big part of a sync department’s goal – and is it still effective as a tool to break artists?

We had an artist called Gabrielle Aplin with us about 10 years ago and we did a lot of syncs for her.

She wrote really highly emotive music and I remember saying, ‘You put a Gabrielle Aplin song on a piece of film content and immediately there’s a chain reaction and as an audience you’re compelled by it’.

Of course it doesn’t always work like that and there are different levels. If it’s a supermarket commercial and they want a disco track to sell their New Year’s Eve party menu, then the song’s more functional than anything.

But in TV, film and certain types of ad, the power of emotion that music can bring can have a profound effect for an artist. Because if someone’s discovering that song for the first time through that, I think it really roots it in their consciousness. And that’s exciting for us. Of course a lot of the times those situations call for catalogue, but the Holy Grail is placing a new artist in one of those moments.

Are there certain sectors within sync that are particularly receptive to using music from new artists?

I think the great thing about sync is that the people who work in it, especially music supervisors, are huge music fans. They care deeply about music and there’s a definite effort and commitment from people that buy our music to showcase new artists.

It’s also useful that sync can be agnostic in the sense that it’s not like radio, where you have to prove an artist is on an upward trajectory, or in live where you can’t book this venue because you won’t sell enough tickets. If a song works for a scene, it could be an unknown track from an artist barely anyone has heard of, but it will still get that shot; that’s the beauty of sync.

In terms of where those opportunities are, it’s Love Island, it’s sport, it’s mainstream culture. In gaming, some of those social platforms like Fortnite, they’re great for new music and that’s where we focus our efforts with new artists.

Is the catalogue track for the big series the most competitive area in sync – because it’s the one that will get the most attention?

I think it is, and it’s also the one where you have the most opinions. I see us as influencers when it comes to catalogue.

It’s very rare that a top name director is going to take a phone call from me and I say, ‘You have to use this New Order song’. That’s not how it works.

What we can do is create really great listening experiences for these directors, create places where they can go and browse our music.

And then when you land one, like Kate Bush in Stranger Things, it’s so powerful. And of course we have to also thank the streaming ecosystem for that. It’s so easy now for someone to watch a show, hear a song, go listen to it straight away and then add it to their playlist. That revolution in music consumption has really benefited sync and pushed it up the industry’s agenda. 15 years ago, you wouldn’t have the same knock-on effects that we see now, not so immediately and not at such a scale.

How often is sync a case of supplying a track a music supervisor has requested – so fulfilling an order, basically – and how often is it a case of persuading someone that you have the exact track they want?

In the majority of cases, it’s a bit of both. There is usually a type of track or an era in mind, and it’s our responsibility to usher people towards our song.

But I think as a sync team we have done well, because we go after the 20% where you can have more influence and impact.

And that’s about relationships. It’s about being in the room at the right time and coming up with compelling reasons why people should use a particular song.

Supervisors are genuinely interested in an anniversary for example. It makes a difference if you can say, ‘Hey, you know what, next year, when this show comes out, it’s the 25th anniversary of this album. There’s a re-issue, there’ll be media coverage and there’ll be marketing, so I can guarantee it will resonate with your audience in a different way then than perhaps you can imagine now’.

What is the Warner competitive edge when it comes to pitching for syncs?

I think we’re traditionally a relationship business, but we’re also becoming an access industry – which isn’t a pun by the way.

We have to always be on and always be ready. We have to move fast. But the relationship thing will never die. The ‘white glove’ approach won’t go away either. If you’re working on a huge Netflix property, a gaming deal or a major ad, you have to hold the hand of the client all the way through. And that’s our duty, given they are paying decent money. We can never lose sight of the service element.

But if it’s a sports team that makes 500 pieces of content a year, we want to be part of that also. And that’s where we need to make sure people can access our music when they want, how they want, in a way that showcases our artists in the best possible way, but also makes it super-simple for the client to navigate.

How big an impact has the explosion of TV streaming platforms had – and, for you, does that go hand in hand with a Golden Age of Television that a lot of people talk about?

It’s had a very positive impact. The money that’s being spent is at a different level now, which means the quality is higher. And if you’re making great quality content, you want great quality music. So we see more opportunities for good songs, which we tend to have in our catalogue, than perhaps we did 20 years ago.

“The money that’s being spent on TV shows now is at a different level.”

And then you compound that with the fact that the creators are using music in a different way than they did 20 years ago. If you think back to brilliant syncs of the nineties and noughties, in shows like Dawson’s Creek, they were great needle drops and highly emotive scenes, but they didn’t use music in the same way that say Stranger Things does, or Sex Education, or Umbrella Academy. In those shows, the syncs are narrative drivers, and that elicits a different response; it hits in a different way.

How has the use of music in gaming changed?

Gaming is ingrained in culture now, and not just youth culture. It’s just a big part of how we consume media.

From a music industry point of view, when we talk about gaming we tend to talk about FIFA and GTA, or some of the rhythm games, and now it’s also Fortnite and Roblox. But if you look at the spectrum of the gaming business, it’s huge. You’ve got mobile gaming on one side, you’ve got triple-A titles that come out in Q4 at the other end, and in the middle you’ve got social gaming. And even then we’re only talking about a slither of what gaming is.

What’s really exciting is that we’re seeing more deals, making more money and seeing more breakthroughs come from gaming partnerships, like we did for Ed Sheeran and Pokémon, or Stormzy and Watch Dogs. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Probably where we need to have a slight shift is in our expectation around what’s achievable, because gaming on the whole does move at a slower pace than the music business and those tent-pole moments take longer to come around and require
more patience.

Is gaming the area with most room for growth?

I think the growth in sync will come from just the scale of content being created. As I mentioned earlier, there are sports teams making more content, e-commerce making more content, fashion making more content… Growth will come from being able to tap into that scale.

“If you’re asking for one area where I think there’s unrealised growth, it’s gaming.”

But yes, if you’re asking for one media area where I think there’s unrealised growth, it would be gaming.

Obviously music being used with visuals basically describes a huge amount of social media content, but I guess the fact that it is made and posted almost instantaneously, by literally tens of millions of creators, in a very organic way, means there’s no room or time for any ‘industry’ input
or influence?

Yeah, I think what you’ve described makes it very hard for us to have any human input in real-time. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t proactively have some input around a system that we create, or a marketplace that we develop, or new ways of marketing our music for certain types of content that we know are going to be made quickly, so it’s easy to get off the shelf.

I think that the challenge we’ve got here is that traditionally, in the sync business, as rights-holders, there’s quite a lot of friction. You have to ask for a licence, you have to go through the legal work, the publishers have to do the same.

We’ve obviously got great people who can do that here, but it can take time. Even for artists that want to move really quickly, it can take time to get a deal done.

And that’s just not realistic to your point around the speed at which most of this social content is created. But I do think that there are artists who, if we presented it in a way that that was beneficial for them, because of a great increase in revenue over time, or because this is where your audience lives, or you’re releasing a song next week, then we can create systems and infrastructures where things can move more quickly, with less friction.

The challenge we have is that all the rights-holders have to want to go on this journey together. As a head of sync, I think that whole area is really exciting and I don’t think it compromises what we do at all.

Can you give us any metrics that illustrate the current size of the business and what the split is between sectors?

So, in the UK alone, last year we did 708 sync deals. When I started, it was around 200 a year. And that doesn’t take into account blanket TV deals that cover, like I say, sports coverage and shows like Love Island where they use thousands of tracks per year.

What I can also say is that more than half of the revenue comes from advertising, but the number of TV deals we do is double the amount that we do for advertising.

And it’s not necessarily just about sync revenue, there’s a secondary impact from a great sync.

The final thing I can say is that we’re growing double-digit year-on-year, but in gaming we’re growing by about 20-30%.

Can you talk us through some of the syncs you and the team are proudest of in the last 12 months or so?

I talked to the team about this, and one that we wanted to highlight is You’re Christmas To Me, by Sam Ryder, which was part of the Your Christmas Or Mine 2 soundtrack.

Warner’s labels in the US have always had soundtrack departments, but we’ve never needed to here. Nevertheless, we’ve had some real success in that area and we’re looking at doing more. That’s a heavy lift, we’re not placing songs, but creating them from scratch. Sam was about 1,000 streams away from having a No. 1 with that track at the end of last year.

We had to work hard to get that soundtrack in the first place. We produced eight new recordings as a sync team and we A&R’d it as sync team, working with Paul Samuels at Atlantic. We created it from the ground up, which is part of that sync 3.0 mindset.

We’re also really proud of the Daft Punk/Beat Saber gaming deal that we did this year, which actually took a couple of years to come to fruition and is a super-successful [VR rhythm] game for Meta.

On TV, Georgie [Hughes] and the team that work on Love Island managed to place a new Ella Henderson song [Alibi] in the closing of the winter series and the opening of the summer series. Shout out also to Carly Reid and Alex Bowers, who are our UK day-to-day leads and are doing an amazing job.

Anything where I’m seeing us go the extra mile, and it’s not just the phone ringing, I’m really proud of that. It’s very easy for someone to say, ‘I saw this, it was amazing and so many people watched it’, but sometimes in those cases people have just picked up the phone.

Which have been your favourite syncs of all time?

The first time I really recognised sync was when I watched Garden State in 2004, with a soundtrack that featured Coldplay, Zero 7, The Shins, Frou Frou…

It was just a beautiful film. I was just starting at university, I really related to every single character and I was blown away by how the music embodies their journey. It made me realise how important music is within film.

To talk about syncs that I worked on: when I was a junior executive, we did an M&S food campaign, with the great music supervisor Dan Neale, called Adventures In Imagination and we used Clean Bandit’s Rather Be.

Visually, they deconstructed different food dishes to create a kaleidoscope of ingredients on screen; to enhance the visuals, we did the same with Clean Bandit’s song, and the band kindly agreed to allow us to use their stems, creating an entirely new version synced to the ad. I think it was creatively very interesting and I really appreciated the band leaning in, because not many artists would allow their music to be deconstructed like that.

And then the final one, because it’s close to my heart, is the Stormzy deal we did for Watch Dogs: Legion. I think it’s the first and only time that an artist of his scale has been used like that in a triple-A game. In a nutshell, the deal resulted in Stormzy and I flying to the Ubisoft studios in Canada, where he was mo-capped and they created his in-game character.

The sync resulted in a playable Stormzy mission with his song as the background, and a striking music video from the game footage. The best thing about this sync is that it will never die, I believe there will be people playing that game for generations to come.