Music for Advertisements and Brand Films

How many music changes should an advert have?

Two or three, in most cases. Advertising is the format our analysis restricts hardest: where a drama episode gets a floor of five sections, an ad is capped at three, and a thirty-second spot will often stay on a single cue from first frame to last.

It also leaves long runs alone. A promo can hold two minutes without a music change and the system will not go looking for a reason to cut — the sparseness is the point, not a gap to be filled.

Where does the music change in an advert?

On edit rhythm rather than on emotion. Ads are cut to a pace, and that pace — not a feeling — is what the analysis follows here. In practice the one change most spots want is at the turn into the product or the call to action.

Changes that land close together are collapsed into one rather than kept apart, which is the opposite of how scripted drama is treated. In an ad, two cues thirty seconds apart read as indecision.

Does this cover corporate and company videos?

Mostly yes, and it is worth knowing where the line falls. A company film that is selling something — a product launch, a recruitment promo, a campaign film — is treated as advertising and belongs here.

A longer company piece built as a story rather than a pitch is classified as a brand story instead, which is a separate type with a much more open structure. If your film is closer to a founder narrative or a customer documentary than to a spot, the brand story page describes how that is handled.

What licence do I need for an advert?

Commercial, at minimum. Advertising is commercial use by definition and the Personal licence does not cover it, regardless of how the finished spot is distributed.

A campaign running in paid media at large scale, or a spot going into broadcast, film or a game, needs the Extended Commercial (Enterprise PLUS) tier. Licences are per track, one-time, with no attribution required.

What to look for in the library

These are the catalogue's own categories, not descriptions we invented for this page — each value below is one you can filter by directly.

These are search dimensions in the library, not a fixed recipe. Video type and track tags are independent — the type decides how the video is cut, not which tags the music must carry.

Start from a filtered view

• Corporate tracks
  Clean, modern arrangements written to sit under a voiceover.
• Electronic tracks
  For spots cut to a pace, where the edit rides the beat.
• Search: uplifting build for a product reveal
  The one change most spots want is the turn into the product.