Music licensing 101: why rerecording can save your campaign

I've seen it on nearly every campaign at some point. Somebody falls in love with a track, cuts the whole edit to it, and then finds out the sync licence costs more than the entire production budget. Or that you simply can't get it for the platforms and countries you need.

Why the "perfect" track is often the expensive one

Licensing a well-known recording for an ad means dealing with at least two rights holders: one for the composition (publishing) and one for that specific recording (the master). More, if there are several writers or labels. The price goes up with audience size, how long you use it, where, and whether you want it exclusively. So a song that feels free on Spotify can easily turn into a five or six figure clearance for a global campaign.

The rerecording option

This is where rerecording, sometimes called a "soundalike" or production rerecord, done properly and legally, comes in. We recreate the feel, energy, and arrangement that drew you to the original, performed and recorded from scratch. You get:

Creative freedom. We can change the length, the instruments and the intensity until it fits your edit perfectly, instead of hacking away at somebody else's recording.

Cleared rights. Because it's an original performance and recording, you're not licensing someone else's master, usage terms are yours to define from the start.

Cost control. You know what it costs before we start, and the price doesn't creep up with audience size or territory the way sync fees do.

What is the difference between publishing and master?

This is where most budgets go off the rails, so let's untangle it.

Every recorded track carries two separate rights. The composition is the melody and lyrics, and belongs to the writers and their publisher. The master is the specific recording you hear, and usually belongs to the label. If you want a well-known track in your commercial you need a yes from both of them, and you negotiate with each one separately.

And that's the classic trap. One side says yes, the team happily keeps editing, and three weeks later the other side says no, or comes back with a number that's way over budget. One yes isn't a clearance!

Licence or rerecord: when do you pick which?

When is a rerecording legally risky?

We should be straight about this, because the industry treats it far too casually.

A rerecording sidesteps the master, not the composition. Replay an existing track and you still need the publisher’s permission. What you save is the negotiation with the label and the often higher master fee, not the whole bill.

What you can't do is copy a track so closely that it's basically the same song, without that permission. That's not a grey area, and there's plenty of case law to prove it. When a project starts drifting in that direction, we stop asking how close we can get and ask what you're actually after. The tempo? The instruments? The mood? None of those are protected. The melody is.

How long does a rerecording take?

Rerecording a thirty-second track usually takes one to two weeks from sign-off to broadcast master, one round of revisions included. That's normally quicker than negotiating the sync for the original, and if your air date is fixed, that often matters more than the difference in price.

If there is vocal on it, add a week for casting and recording.

Does a rerecording have to sound identical?

It shouldn't, and the good ones don't. What a team loves about a reference track is almost never that exact recording. It's the tempo, an instrument, a mood, the way the chorus opens up. That's the stuff worth rebuilding.

Working from that angle also removes the legal risk described above, and it usually produces something better: a piece written for your edit and your brand rather than someone else’s, three minutes long, mixed for a different medium a decade ago.

What do you ask before the edit starts?

Four questions, five minutes in total. They are nearly always asked too late.

1. Do we know who the publisher and who the label is? If not, any cost estimate is guesswork.
2. Which territories and what term do we need? The Netherlands, six months, online only is a very different figure from worldwide and in perpetuity.
3. What happens if it falls through? Is there a plan B, or is the whole campaign hanging on this one track?
4. When is the delivery deadline? A sync negotiation that takes six weeks won't work for a campaign going on air in four.

Answer those four at the start and you'll usually know within a day which way to go. Skip them and you'll find out in week three, the hard way.

When licensing the original still makes sense

Rerecording isn't always the answer, to be fair. If that one recording is the whole point (an iconic moment, a voice everybody knows) then paying for the licence can be worth it. It comes down to budget, timing, and how much of the magic is in "that exact recording" rather than in the feel of the song.

Still not sure which way to go? Send me the track and the brief and I'll tell you honestly what I'd do, whether that's a rerecording or a full music for advertising production. Get in touch.

Want an existing song cleared rather than rerecorded? That is what a music supervisor does. Weighing a library track instead? See stock music or custom music.