The ugly truth of how movie scores are made

[⠀]

Shock! Horror! Ghostproducing and credit stealing is rife in the industry by well known names who gank the work of their underlings because they've got the brand and are selling them dreams of putting them on. Who would've thunk it?

Quotes:

"The streaming revolution is changing the way film composers get paid and exposing the flaws of a system where big names farm their scores out to uncredited “ghost composers.” Now, the artists actually writing the music are demanding recognition—and a fair share of the profits."

"Creating music in 21st-century Hollywood, as a composer for an Emmy-winning cable series put it, “feels like an underground, a real pimp situation.” He talked about long hours, low pay, and working under a martinet “lead composer”—his boss—who delegated the actual work of writing and recording. “One time he had a meltdown because the director was coming to hear what he had come up with and he didn’t have anything to play him,” the composer went on, “because my computer had all the music on it and it was on the fritz!” He laughed—c’est la guerre. But the irritation and dismay were palpable. Another Hollywood composer summed up the widespread feeling among the men and women who do the day-to-day work of bending melody, harmony, and rhythm to match pictures on a movie or television screen: “There’s no contract, there’s no union. You’re completely beholden to working with someone who’s completely unethical or not.”"

"Much of the resentment traces back to film composing’s biggest open secret: Many of its brightest stars do not, in fact, write the music they are celebrated and remunerated for. That work, or a good bit of it, is delegated to others. Sometimes those others are credited as “additional composers,” but often they are gig workers, effectively, who receive modest pay and no credit. Such shadow contributors are known as “ghost composers,” and the debate over how name-brand music directors get paid is haunted by their existence."

"“There’s a secretiveness to it all that’s strange,” one composer told me on condition of anonymity. “There’s the world everyone sees—and then you look under the hood.”"

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/the-ugly-truth-of-how-movie-scores-are-made?fbclid=IwAR0hIiuLxsMoreBQkoJ24dwNCjvTMVd8SkJrfwGwdqpGQ5ZaXegV8N3jsPE

[Soopafly DPGC]

So what?  You either pimp or get pimped.