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Roy Dassow
Depending on where you live in the United States, turning the calendar from April to May means entering the second or third month of an indefinite period of social distancing. With little other choice in the way of entertainment, people have naturally turned to streaming TV to fill the time and to escape from the increasingly bleak news. Deciding among the available options can be overwhelming, however, and even a trending phenomenon like Tiger King can fall off the radar in an instant.
More than a way to burn through the hours cooped up at home, though, television can be a vital vehicle for music discovery. With the recent arrival of a Spike Jonze-directed Beastie Boys documentary on Apple TV, the ongoing Bachelor musical spin-off Listen to Your Heart and the upcoming release of Damien Chazelle's modern Parisian jazz tale The Eddy, now is as good a time as ever to stream TV with an ear towards the soundtrack.
One part live storytelling performance, one part career retrospective and one part tribute to late Beastie Boys MC Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys story is as form and genre-agnostic as the influential band that it profiles. Spike Jonze's documentary is centered around the two living Beasties, Adam Horowitz and Michael Diamond, re-telling the story of their journey from New York hardcore scene teens to international rap party boys to the boundary-redefining hip-hop artists they eventually became.
Streaming on: Apple TV+
If you're already a fan of the most important group ever to come out of Staten Island, then the sell for a TV show dramatizing the beginnings of the Wu-Tang Clan is easy. If you're not, the RZA-helmed biographical drama Wu-Tang: An American Saga functions as an excellent primer for how unique the group's music was and still is.
Streaming on: Hulu
Now in its fourth season, Issa Rae's Insecure has developed a well-deserved reputation for picking out new hip-hop and R&B tracks that fit its moods perfectly. It's also extremely bingeable, a combination of sharp comedic writing and hook-you-in drama. For a crash course on some of the best R&B released since 2016, you could do much worse than making your way through Insecure and writing down every song you hear.
Streaming on: HBO
With needle drops on classic rock mainstays like David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix alongside contemporary artists like Y La Bamba and Omar Apollo, this new spin on the 2000 filmis anchored by exactly the kind of painstakingly eclectic soundtrack you'd expect from a show about the owner of a record store. It's also a story made to inspire spirited music debates with friends, which can be a blast even when it's happening over a video call.
Streaming on: Hulu
There is perhaps no single showcase for the depth and scope of the late Adam Schlesinger's musical prowess better than Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: The Fountains of Wayne songwriter wrote or co-wrote 157 original songs over the show's four-season run. If you want a sense of why music communities were so particularly devastated by his loss, making your way through Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and the smart, genre-hopping tunes in each episode is a great place to start.
Streaming on: Netflix
Considering it is written by and stars Donald Glover, one of the brightest and most multifaceted talents in music and Hollywood right now, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Atlanta is full of smart music references, clever song placements and perfectly deployed rapper cameos. If you're a fan of contemporary hip-hop, the show is worth watching just for the season-one Migos appearance. Plus, the fictional trap banger that instigates Atlanta's plot is pretty good in its own right.
Streaming on: Hulu
David Lynch's cult classic about a myserious murder in an eerily insular town in the Pacific Northwest is surreal, perplexing and impeccably scored. The theme song and most of the soundtrack is ambient synth-driven pop tunes do much of the heavy lifting in establishing the show's atmosphere. If you exhaust the two seasons from the early 1990s, the series was also revived for one year as Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, available for streaming on Showtime.
Streaming on: Netflix, Hulu, Showtime
Samurai Champloo is a critically acclaimed but short-lived anime from 2004 whose influence you might recognize in a certain corner of hip-hop today. The late Japanese production titan Nujabes wrote the show's opening and closing themes as well as much of the soundtrack, and the combination of sleek animated visuals and his signature melodic, sample-heavy hip-hop struck a chord that still reverberates today. If you have ever studied or relaxed to a lo-fi hip-hop beat, you can thank the work that Nujabes did on this soundtrack.
Streaming on: Hulu
Credit to NPR Music contributor Hanif Abdurraqib for inspiring this pick. It can be difficult for a historical drama to pull off pop song placements that don't feel too obvious or too clever, but The Americans manages to thread the needle, setting thrilling scenes of '80s Cold War espionage and betrayal to a smart mix of massive hits and hidden gems from the era.
Streaming on: Amazon Prime
I spent the last week before the holidays on recovery from a wisdom tooth extraction - maybe fortuitous given *gestures everything going in the world* - but a pleasant, almost forced relaxation after a whirlwind of a year.
Not only did it start to give a name to sounds that we had essentially married into our subconscious over the years, but the more I dived into it the more I learned that it was an actual branch of marketing - complete with strategies, agencies, and opportunities for brands.
Like anything in marketing, it seems simple from the outset but naturally complex in the actual process - Brian Ono created almost 84 different tunes for the iconic Windows 95 logo, quite a task for something that was *checks notes* about three seconds long.
When I first wrote about jingles last July, I became fascinated by the science behind why certain songs get stuck in our heads more than others and came up with a short framework to distinguish famous jingles from forgotten ones: MES.
Because of this, sonic branding needs more than just a catchy sound to capture hearts and minds - it needs to rely on the other two parts of MES very heavily: emotional connection and exposure.
Smart speakers are another exciting opportunity - imagining that you could turn on lightbulbs, microwaves, and thermostats with an Alexa gives essential household appliances suddenly the same sonic wield as an Apple. Any home appliance company can now think through whether they want a different identity with the functioning device. Checking the weather or a sports score could also come with its own sonic introduction - the equivalent of the NBC chimes for basic information.
One of the biggest changes for audio and day-to-day brand and product experience will happen in the mobility sector. With the gradual disappearance of the combustion engine, we're re-inventing the sound of mobility all together. The best of both worlds would be to focus on safety whilst keeping it ownable for your brand. But how do you do that? I bet there are a few Research and Development people at Harley Davidson HQ already pondering over that.
Sure, this is still likely not an immediate priority for most brands, and the easiest shortcut may be to tack on an identifiable sound at the end of a youtube video. But sonic branding is still a growing concept in the marketing world, and there is still lots of time to be early in adopting any part of a sonic identity: a logo, a simple transaction sound, or more. Agencies like Massive Music are among many agencies now curious about sound.
Sonic logos were common in the realm of international shortwave broadcasts. Each station had its own Interval Signal, which was repeated over and over during breaks in actual broadcasts, or during the few minutes before a scheduled broadcast started. Tuning on shortwave was tricky, and you sometimes needed to try a different frequency when the atmosphere was being unfriendly to your usual frequency. Hearing the Interval Signal for Havana or BBC told you instantly that you were there, ready for the start of real programs.
The days were mostly blurry, lost in a sea of new yogurt brands and a tantalizing rotation of painkillers, but I did what most people do when they\u2019re physically comatose: end up watching a lot of streaming.
TUDUM is Netflix\u2019s in-house name for the \u201Cstartup\u201D sound when the logo appears on the screen. As a fun tribute, Netflix apparently held a global fan event called \u201CTUDUM,\u201D all about unleashing new trainers and announcements.
One of my favorite definitions of sonic branding comes from an Adweek piece from way back in 2013 around the concept: the process of \u201Cdistilling a multimillion-dollar brand into a few seconds of sound\u201D. Typically, the outcome of sonic branding is a good sound or short jingle that can imprint a brand into your head - a \u201Csonic logo,\u201D if you will.
Think about every time you\u2019ve started or rebooted a computer in your life. You\u2019ve probably heard one of many unique chimes from Microsoft (Shout out, Windows 95, and Windows XP) or Apple (I\u2019m an Apple fanboy, but none of them are that great, let\u2019s honest) that distinguishes their computer from others. Every time you sit down to watch a show, start a game or hear a ring tone on the phone, you hear some product of sonic branding.
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