Extreme Music Download

[Mahmod Ohner]

ExtremeMusic is a production music arm of Sony Music Publishing. The company creates and licenses music for use in television, film, advertising, and online media. Their library includes music from artists and composers such as Quincy Jones, Hans Zimmer, George Martin, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, Junkie XL, Labrinth, Ramin Djawadi, Timbaland, Ricky Reed, Brian Tyler, Blues Saraceno, Rodney Jerkins, Eddie Kramer, John Debney, Two Steps from Hell and Dweezil Zappa. Extreme Music is headquartered in London, with its creative operations based in Santa Monica, California.[1][2][3]

Emanuel also managed bands, including Stiff Little Fingers. After beginning a job at a third production library, MatchMusic, Emanuel and Stiff Little Fingers drummer Dolph Taylor began to compose music for MatchMusic together. They built a MIDI suite, and when not on tour, they recorded original tracks that reflected their own musical sensibilities. "We were forever knocking our heads against old-school attitudes and being told that 'This is what the marketplace likes.' But we were seeing a new generation of editors coming into the industry and going to clubs and hearing all these thumping records, and they wanted to know why production music didn't sound like that," Taylor said in a 2003 interview. Taylor and Emanuel decided to approach commercial artists, some of whom they already knew, and ask them to record production music tracks.[4]

With a $100,000 investment from angel investor Mark Levinson, Extreme Music was founded in 1997. The company was positioned to reflect thepunk rock ethos of its founders; for example, they mailed condoms to 1,000 music industry executives with packaging that read "Extreme Music: The Only Safe Thing You'll Ever Get From Us." With a focus on production, they "upped the industry ante by using professional recording studios and top-notch musicians."[2][4]

In August 2005 Extreme Music was bought by Viacom, the then-parent company of CBS, UPN, and Paramount Pictures for $45.1 million, and in 2008 it was acquired by Sony/ATV Music Publishing (now Sony Music Publishing). The terms of the sale were not disclosed.[2][5][6][7]

In August 2013, Extreme partnered with composer Hans Zimmer and his business partner, Steve Kofsky, to launch Bleeding Fingers Music. A joint venture, it creates show-specific libraries and scores for unscripted, reality, documentary and light drama television shows. In 2017, it was ranked as the leading custom music scoring company in the industry[clarification needed].[12][13]

"The thing about library music, or production music, is that it's certainly never been the most exciting area of the music industry," admits Russell. "I first came across it years ago when I worked in the post room of Bruton Music, while I was trying to get my band away with a friend, Warren Bennett, who's now a successful library music composer. Bruton was one of the first production music libraries, and it was all on vinyl back then, and with a few exceptions tended to be full of people knocking out soundalikes of current hits. They'd change the chord structure round a bit and that would be it."

"Because it seemed to solve all the complicated licensing issues and permissions, it's an area of the industry that grew up very fast, and that was my first experience of it," continues Russell. "While we were working packing records in the post room, Warren's dad, who got us the job, had his own studio and he was writing in his spare time when he wasn't on tour. Brian produced an album with us for Bruton which was soundalikes of Ultravox and The Police and bands of that time, which was a great experience, but looking back it was completely dreadful! Years later, when I hooked up with Dolph in 1986, I was still getting cheques from that. We were doing other things at the time, Dolph was playing drums in Stiff Little Fingers and I was managing artists, but the cheques continued to drop through the door and I thought 'There's something in this, we should keep this going.' So we set up our own MIDI suite and started composing when we weren't on tour, or managing other people.

"We wrote for some music libraries that we were able to get into at the time, eventually writing for a small company called Match Music which we ended up running in the UK. It was a fantastic lesson for us in 'This is how we don't want to do it;' traditional old-school emulations which were not very sexy at all. What we wanted to do was use our commercial record experience and create a music library that had the same high production values as any major label, not only in the music but also in the presentation and marketing."

"There was a very good case for making it a lot cooler," agrees Dolph. "We were forever knocking our heads against old-school attitudes and being told that 'This is what the marketplace likes.' But we were seeing a new generation of editors coming into the industry and going to clubs like The End and Home, hearing all these thumping records, and they wanted to know why production music didn't sound like that. So we decided that the best thing to do was to approach commercial artists, some of whom we knew, some of whom we found, and some who were up and coming, and say 'Right. Make some library music.' Everyone was going 'Oooh, I don't know about that,' because those guys had always thought that library music was a second-division way of making music."

"It was a chicken-and-egg situation," explains Russell, "because we needed to create a library that felt cool enough for them, but we needed to get someone to actually produce something for us to get the ball rolling! Fortunately, we're in a position now where all that work's done, we've done the 'heavy lifting' and now composers usually approach us. Sometimes they have material already done that they haven't used, but most of the time we'll commission new material. We're always looking for new composers. Although a lot of them are well known, we also look for specialised or emerging talent as well. Historically, what libraries tended to do was gather a stable of composers, and they would just keep revisiting them, so one guy might have been producing drum & bass, but he might also have been doing a rock album, and then some jazz at the same time. So essentially, that's why the editors were wondering why their production music didn't sound great, because in order for it to be the real deal you should only create the sound that you live and breathe."

"Even now, four and a half years in, we don't think of ourselves as having a 'stable'," says Dolph. "There are people who have stayed around since Day One, but there are others that have come through. For instance Bushwacka [of Layo & Bushwacka fame] came through when we were doing a tech-house album because he is, pretty much, the inventor of tech-house. He's only ever appeared on that particular album, as that was the project that interested him."

The most high-profile example of Extreme's work with big-name artists is their collaboration with Hans Zimmer and Jay Rifkin's Media Ventures group. Hans and his team of film music composers, including Klaus Badelt, Patrick Cassidy, Harry Gregson-Williams, Gavin Greenaway, Steve Jablonsky, James S Levine, Henning Lohner, John Powell and Geoff Zannelli, have contributed to a series called Director's Cuts, which offers authentic Hollywood epic blockbuster film scores to library clients. Director's Cuts makes impressive use of Media Ventures' expertise with real and sampled orchestras: "Media Ventures bring a lot of eletronica into the orchestral sound anyway, so some of it is done using their massive sample library, and some is done with real strings or maybe a solo instrumentalist," explains Dolph.

"There's a lot of programmes where they'll clear a hit tune for the UK release, but they sell the show worldwide and find they haven't got clearance, or a different publisher becomes involved," explains Dolph. "It quickly becomes problematic, so they start stripping the tracks out and replacing them with library music instead. So they're asking for more and more songs."

So how do Russell and Dolph decide what to commission? "With contemporary library music, it follows the modern trend," says Dolph. "I'm always very keen to know what's going to be happening in Ibiza next year, not this year, so I'll talk to a lot of DJs, a lot of underground artists who are coming up with new ideas. So we do a lot of that, but we also produce in evergreen areas that we know people are always going to want. For instance, people are always going to need authentic ethnic music, so we're producing a comprehensive world music series which is a major project for us.

"You do see fashions come around. There's a lot of people asking for '80s stuff at the moment, stuff like Erasure and Depeche Mode, because most of the people that are asking for that are now in positions of power in the edit suites, but that's the music they listened to when they were at school and it means a lot to them. It comes around very quickly. Decades go by in a year nowadays."

Creating a library with an authentic feel is easier in some genres than others. "Punk rock was one of the hardest ones, simply because people play too well nowadays," insists Dolph. "The punk attitude wasn't about playing instruments, it was about expressing yourself. You've got to find someone who's really angry and has an axe to grind. From our own background we know a lot of those guys, but I couldn't go to Glen Matlock or Jake Burns and say 'Write me a punk song,' because they play too well now and they're just not as angry as they were!"

"Everyone thinks they can do it, but they can't," agrees Russell. "One of the other problems now is finding a studio that's shit enough to put them in! We try to use the right mics and gear that was being used at the time and, where we can, studios that have still got those values. Dolph's having to go round spitting in the microphones and putting old strings on dodgy old copy guitars. And the bass player's got to have bought his first guitar two weeks ago, drunk seven cans of Special Brew for breakfast, and he's only allowed to use the E string!"

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