How music super­vi­sor became the hottest job in Hollywood

As the cam­era sweeps over a glit­ter­ing par­ty scene in Emer­ald Fennell’s sen­sa­tion Salt­burn – the one where Bar­ry Keoghan sports antlers and Jacob Elor­di wears angel wings – we hear the shrill hook of Mason and Princess Superstar’s ​“Per­fect (Exceed­er)”. ​“1−2−3−4, let me hear you scream if you want some more!” – the lyrics, paired with the heavy punch of the beat, ges­ture toward the film’s depic­tions of bac­cha­na­lian excess. Soon after the film’s release, the 2006 dance clas­sic shot back into the UK and US charts, while on Spo­ti­fy, the num­ber of month­ly lis­ten­ers for Princess Super­star jumped almost overnight from 600,000 to near­ly six mil­lion. On Tik­Tok over 30,000 videos fea­tur­ing some ver­sion of the song were cre­at­ed, con­tribut­ing to such a surge in pop­u­lar­i­ty; in the dig­i­tal age, the pre­ci­sion strike of a per­fect music cue holds more pow­er than ever.

Kirsten Lane, Saltburn’s music super­vi­sor, was already a sea­soned pro­fes­sion­al across the land­scape of British film and tele­vi­sion, work­ing on projects with such main­stays as Dan­ny Boyle and Richard Cur­tis. Still, she saw her posi­tion soar to new heights of salience with the film’s viral nee­dle drops, which also includ­ed more main­stream high­lights of the mid-noughties like MGMT’s ​“Time to Pre­tend” and ​“Mr. Bright­side” by The Killers. ​“The labels and the pub­lish­ers are super excit­ed when they’ve got their artists in a film,” Lane explains, as much of her role con­sists of liais­ing between the film’s pro­duc­tion and the record labels who hold the rights to the music. ​“They’ll see it as their film. They get just as excit­ed about the place­ment as the direc­tor. Every­body likes to feel that they’re a part of the process, and under­stand­ing that is real­ly important.”

The music of Salt­burn serves as its pul­sat­ing tonal through­line, irre­sistible as a club banger and just as elec­tric, while still man­ag­ing to fix the film’s high­ly spe­cif­ic son­ic land­scape. The cap­stone cue of the film, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ​“Mur­der on the Dance­floor” proved to be its most pop­u­lar – over 20 years after the song’s ini­tial release, Ellis-Bex­tor per­formed the song for the BAFTA’s 2024 cer­e­mo­ny, with a slew of gigs lined up across North Amer­i­ca. “‘Mur­der on the Dance Floor’ for instance, was script­ed, right at the very begin­ning,” Lane says. ​“Direc­tors like Emer­ald, they’re very musi­cal peo­ple. That’s part of their whole process. It’s cer­tain­ly not my place to come in and rip it all out and say, oh, you can’t have that, you should do this. That’s not my job. My job is to make their dream come true.”

It’s a roman­tic notion, the idea that the role of a music super­vi­sor is one of com­plete free­dom, with the abil­i­ty to choose indi­vid­ual songs and cues for a film’s sound­track at a whim. The real­i­ty is more com­pli­cat­ed, and col­lab­o­ra­tive. ​“Prob­a­bly 90% of a music supervisor’s job is coor­di­nat­ing the clear­ances and licens­ing,” Lane admits. ​“Get­ting every­body on the same page and get­ting every­body to agree.” The con­struc­tion of Saltburn’s sound­track, for exam­ple, was large­ly based on Emer­ald Fennell’s own playlists from her time at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty. When spe­cif­ic tracks were too expen­sive to license or the rights proved too dif­fi­cult to clear, it was Lane’s job to sug­gest an alter­na­tive which cap­tured the same tone neces­si­tat­ed by the script.

Despite such an empha­sis on logis­tics, there is space for Lane to explore the cre­ativ­i­ty of the role. ​“If there are no music ref­er­ences in the script at all, it’s up to me to fig­ure out: okay, this is a mon­tage sequence, this is a key moment, this is a moment of com­e­dy, a moment of dra­ma, a moment of sad­ness,” she says. ​“I have to decide, does it need to be some­thing that is well known? Or some­thing that’s a hid­den gem, that no one’s heard of before?”

Lane has been in the busi­ness since before the idea of the music super­vi­sor exist­ed; when she first entered the indus­try in the nineties, the job usu­al­ly fell to a pro­duc­tion assis­tant tasked with track­ing down the rights to music. It was Lane and her boss at Poly­gram Records who togeth­er set up the first depart­ment ded­i­cat­ed to film and tele­vi­sion with­in the record label, active­ly pitch­ing the label’s cat­a­logue to pro­duc­tions rang­ing from tele­vi­sion to film to adver­tise­ments. Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smok­ing Bar­rels and Roger Michell’s Not­ting Hill served as break­through films for the bud­ding posi­tion. Sound­track coor­di­na­tor, music con­sul­tant, music licens­ing coor­di­na­tor – these cred­its served as the ear­li­est ver­sions of what is now under­stood to be the broad­er role of music super­vi­sor. Lane has since worked with some of Britain’s most estab­lished film­mak­ers, includ­ing Edgar Wright, Joe Wright, Autumn de Wilde, and now Emer­ald Fennell.

Sit­ting at the oppo­site end of the tonal spec­trum, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers fea­tured sev­er­al key moments where music served an impor­tant the­mat­ic role – so impor­tant that spe­cif­ic tracks were fea­tured in the script, and there­fore need­ed to be cleared by music super­vi­sor Con­nie Farr before pro­duc­tion began, and before any major names had been attached. ​“The Pow­er of Love” by Frankie Goes to Hol­ly­wood pro­vides emo­tion­al book­ends for the film; upon the ini­tial meet­ing between Andrew Scott’s Adam and Paul Mescal’s Har­ry, the song plays faint­ly in the back­ground as part of a ​“Top of the Pops” episode. ​“There’s vam­pires at my door,” whis­pers a drunk­en Har­ry in the scene, para­phras­ing the song, before turn­ing away. Both instances of the song’s usage had to be cleared by the rights holders.

Con­nie Farr has spent most of her career work­ing with inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers, includ­ing with Clio Barnard on Ali & Ava and Sarah Gavron on Rocks. Inde­pen­dent film means small­er bud­gets and less mon­ey to license major nee­dle drops. Before putting togeth­er the sound­track for Rocks, Farr inter­viewed the main actors and their par­ents, try­ing to find the right songs which might feel organ­ic to the char­ac­ters. ​“I had to try and pre­dict, with the help of the rights hold­ers, what might be big,” Farr explains. ​“I mean, we chose Lit­tle Simz, Ray BLK, Mae Muller, Koko­roko – and we were real­ly try­ing to get these teenage girls to respond to the music, but they would say, ​‘I don’t know it, nev­er heard of it.’ That was the real challenge.”

The mag­ic of Rocks was a cer­tain intan­gi­ble ele­ment of authen­tic­i­ty – the girls were not pro­fes­sion­al actors, and much of their rap­port result­ed from ad-libbed moments. Dur­ing one scene, they ref­er­ence a meme which sam­ples a ser­mon by Shirley Cae­sar, a gospel singer based in North Car­oli­na. As the film’s music super­vi­sor, Farr had to find a way to con­tact Cae­sar direct­ly in order to license the song; even­tu­al­ly, the pro­duc­tion made a dona­tion to her church. This is the kind of cre­ative prob­lem-solv­ing which appeals to Farr.

“I think of it like a tri­an­gle. You’ve got to be flex­i­ble on either bud­get, cre­ativ­i­ty, or time. If you’ve got all the time in the world, I feel quite com­fort­able and con­fi­dent, because there’s so many prob­lems that can come up,” Farr says. ​“You’re help­ing some­one facil­i­tate their vision, but at the same time, I’m quite a big fan of inde­pen­dent labels and pub­lish­ers and I real­ly push for an inde­pen­dent alter­na­tive when I can. It’s so excit­ing when you get to pick some real­ly obscure music.”

When work­ing with these hid­den gems, not every nee­dle drop results in the same viral resur­gence as ​“Per­fect (Exceed­er)” or ​“Mur­der on the Dance­floor.” After ​“The Pow­er of Love” appeared in All of Us Strangers, the song didn’t climb back into the UK charts. Teenagers didn’t clip it into dance remix­es on Tik­Tok; Hol­ly John­son didn’t per­form it at a high-pro­file awards show this year, 40 years after the song’s ini­tial release. How­ev­er, as the cam­era slow­ly pans out on Adam and Har­ry togeth­er, and the edges of the frame fade into an ether-black noth­ing­ness, it is the song which sig­ni­fies one of the most pow­er­ful moments of the film: ​“Love is the light scar­ing dark­ness away.”