Music Supervision Is the New Cinematography

I spent the better part of a weekend watching the first episodes of four different prestige-TV shows back-to-back. I was not trying to analyse anything. I was just catching up. What I noticed, by the end of Sunday, was that the specific thing I had most enjoyed across all four shows was the music. Not the scores. The needle drops. The specific pre-existing songs that the music supervisors had chosen to place in specific scenes.

Once I noticed this, I started paying attention. And the more I paid attention, the more I started to think that music supervision has become, for contemporary prestige production, what cinematography was for the 2010s: the specific craft that most reliably signals a show or a film’s identity, that the audience responds to without always naming, that a small number of specific practitioners are doing at a level that distinguishes their work.

This sounds like a large claim. I think I can make it.

What the music supervisor actually does

The music supervisor’s job is to find, license, and place the pre-existing recorded songs that go into a film or show. This is more complicated than it sounds. The supervisor reads the script, watches cuts, discusses specific scenes with the director, proposes songs, negotiates with rights holders, stays inside the budget, and ultimately hands the director a short list of specific tracks that could fit a specific moment. The director chooses. The supervisor places.

When it is done well, the specific song in the specific scene produces an emotional effect that the scene, without the song, would not produce. When it is done badly, the song feels pasted on. The craft difference between these outcomes is substantial and is entirely the supervisor’s responsibility.

The supervisors who are doing the highest-level work are specific people with specific catalogues of preferences, specific relationships with rights holders, specific sensibilities for what a contemporary production needs. Their work is legible in the final product to anyone paying attention.

The contemporary supervisors

A short list of the specific practitioners whose work I can recognise, mostly, without looking at the credits.

Randall Poster. The specific senior figure. Music supervisor on Wes Anderson’s films since Rushmore (1998), on most of Martin Scorsese’s productions since roughly Bringing Out the Dead, and on substantial other work. Poster’s specific signature is an unusual breadth of catalogue (he knows old American blues, 1960s pop, specific European folk, 1990s alternative rock, specific modern independent music) combined with a specific willingness to make unexpected choices. His Scorsese work in particular has defined what the Scorsese needle drop is, to the point where most other directors attempting the same move can be heard trying to do what Poster does.

Susan Jacobs. Paul Thomas Anderson’s supervisor, including Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza. Jacobs brings a specific sensibility toward American 1970s music (because of Anderson’s filmmaking interests) that is more specifically expert than most practitioners operating at the prestige level.

Kier Lehman. Barry Jenkins’s supervisor across Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, and substantial hip-hop and R&B productions. Lehman’s specific strength is bringing contemporary Black musical practice to the prestige-film context with specific curation.

Robin Urdang. Luca Guadagnino’s supervisor, including Call Me by Your Name, Challengers, and Queer. Urdang’s work on Challengers in particular (the Reznor and Ross score is separate, but the non-score music placement was specifically inspired) demonstrates the craft: the Rihanna and Nelly placements land exactly the way they were intended to land.

Maggie Phillips. Currently one of the most-placed supervisors, with credits on Fargo, The Bear, and various others. Phillips’s specific achievement on The Bear is the legibility of the Chicago music scene as a specific musical ecosystem: the needle drops on that show are not just mood-matching but location-specific, reflecting what would actually play in that specific Chicago restaurant.

What has changed to make this so prominent

Three specific shifts have raised the stakes of music supervision.

Licensing has become substantially more affordable for catalogue music. Across the last fifteen years, the specific economics of music licensing have shifted. The major labels, facing flat per-unit pricing for recorded music, have become more willing to license catalogue tracks at reasonable rates to film and TV productions, because those licenses are now a meaningful revenue stream. A supervisor in 2008 might have spent $100,000 to license a specific iconic track. The same track in 2024 might be available at $25,000. The specific economic constraint that previously limited supervisor choice has loosened.

Streaming-era audiences respond to specific songs as location markers. Contemporary audiences, whose music consumption is substantially streaming-playlist-based, respond to specific songs as specific cultural markers. A Fleetwood Mac track in a 2024 prestige show activates specific audience associations (a specific Stevie Nicks era, the specific Rumours moment) in ways that are more legible than they were twenty years ago. Supervisors are working with a specific audience literacy that makes the specific song placement a more efficient communication tool.

The score is in retreat for specific productions. Some contemporary shows specifically foreground pre-existing music over original scoring. The Bear uses specific needle drops as its main musical vocabulary. Daisy Jones & The Six is structured around pre-existing music and in-universe originals. Yellowjackets uses its 1990s catalogue aggressively. The supervisor, on these productions, is doing the work that a composer would do on a more traditionally-scored production.

The risks of the over-reliance

I want to be fair to the composers. Needle-drop supervision, when relied on too heavily, can replace original scoring in ways that flatten a show’s musical identity. If every prestige show is using a specifically-curated selection of pre-existing tracks, the supervisor’s craft becomes, paradoxically, harder to recognise as individual, because the broader catalogue of available music is being drawn from by every supervisor at once.

The specific risk is that prestige-TV music starts to sound, in aggregate, like a shared Spotify playlist. A well-supervised show is recognisably its own thing. A badly-supervised show sounds like the collective averaged preferences of a mid-2020s prestige audience, which is not a specific musical identity but a generic one.

The Bear is mostly on the right side of this line. So is Challengers. So are Anderson’s films. Other specific shows (I am not going to name them, because this is a craft essay rather than a negative-review essay) are over-reliant on catalogue music that does not belong to them in a specific way.

What to listen for

Pay attention to music supervisor credits. They are usually near the top of the closing credits, sometimes buried a little. The same names will appear repeatedly across productions you find specifically musical. Once you have identified a supervisor whose work you respond to, their other projects are, often, worth specifically looking up.

Poster on Anderson and Scorsese. Jacobs on Paul Thomas Anderson. Lehman on Jenkins. Urdang on Guadagnino. Phillips on The Bear and adjacent. These are specific practitioners whose specific work is producing the specific musical identity of the shows and films you are watching.

The cinematographer’s name used to be the specific authorial credit on a film, after the director’s. The music supervisor’s name is quietly joining it. Start noticing. Once you do, you will not be able to stop.