Hillary Clinton spent more than $46 million on her campaign in pursuit of the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, so you can only imagine how much gets spent on every facet of the political trail, including music. Billboard published an interesting story today looking at Marmoset Music, a Portland-based music supervision agency that has been providing the former Secretary of State with tunes for her advertising purposes.
Numbers are rare in the story, but we learn that Marmoset works with corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, JC Penney and Levi's, and projects that it will earn more than $5 million in revenue that will go directly to independent musicians. So how much money will Clinton contribute to and up-and-coming music career? Marmoset declined to answer, but suggested that an original score costing between $2,500 and $10,000, with synchs (the fees paid for the rights to use such music with other media, such as an campaign commercial) could push the total up to $20,000, depending on how much usage it gets.
Two examples were given of commercials that included songs lined up by Marmoset for its client. Clinton's April commercial, titled "The Power of Organizing," featured the song "Bravo" by The Little Indians, an indie pop band out of Baltimore. Working for Marmoset can land you some great gigs as well: Cofounder Brian Hall and his band Sunbeam placed the song "Orange & Red" in a separate advertisement for the candidate.
"We try to stay away from making any strong statement, politically or otherwise, but in this case, the candidate seemed like one we could get behind pretty easily," fellow cofounder Ryan Wines told Billboard. Not that anyone would ever suggest that the music industry tends to lean left when it comes to politics.
In case you were wondering: Marmoset had nothing to do with the ridiculous "Stand With Hillary" track that dropped during December.
