By Zona Marie Tan
Need to find a new song for your upcoming film’s soundtrack? Want a quirky hip hop tune for your 30-second spot, but have no idea what fits? The Australasian Music Publishers Association Ltd (AMPAL)’s Songfind service might just be able to help.
Songfind is a registered song enquiry submission service at the AMPAL website that will assist music users with a specific song they need for their film or television commercial.
“Let’s say you’ve got a scene where the character’s singing about bananas and you’re looking for a jazzy song that has the word ‘bananas’ in them,” says AMPAL’s general manager Mark Callaghan. “You just need to fill out a Songfind enquiry form on the website and then its emailed out to all our publisher members. That arrives on the creative manager’s desk at the publishing company desk who may have three songs that might be appropriate and then email back the enquirer directly.”
Songfind users will have access to all kinds of music from AMPAL’s member Australasian publishers which also includes all major international music publishers with Australian affiliations like as Universal Music. To top it off, the service is free.
“We don’t charge anything for it. It’s completely free.” Callaghan says. “We have no ulterior motive other than to put the music users in touch with the publishers, and make life easier for the music users.”
To create awareness about AMPAL’s new Songfind service and get the industry familiar with it, AMPAL launched a Songfind Quiz on on Monday August 4.
“We set up the service a while ago and no one knew it was there,” concedes Callaghan. “We’re doing this quiz so people can have a bit of fun and get used to coming to the AMPAL site to use Songfind.”
Music know-it-alls will be faced with a new set of 10 questions randomly selected from 20 each week for nine weeks. There will be a different theme with every week’s new set of challenging questions.
“We want to find out who knows more about music – people in the film business or people in advertising,” says AMPAL’s general manager Mark Callaghan. “We want to get all of you guys competing against each other to find out who’s the music smarty-pants. It’s good fun.”
Points are accumulated for every correct answer, and the person with the highest score at the end of the nine weeks might stand the chance to win a Fender or Gibson guitar, among many other prizes. However, those joining in mid-way will have the opportunity to catch up and complete the previous week’s questions.
From Paul McCartney to The Wiggles, be sure you know your music well enough because it’s not just about the artists and their hits.
“There are devilishly clever questions in there, which will surprise,” Callaghan says. “What’s different about this quiz is that it’s more about songs than song writing. People tend to associate songs with artists, which is obvious. But oftentimes it’s not the artist who wrote that song.”
So reckon you know all of Nick Cave’s lyrics by heart? Stop singing in the shower and prove yourself at the Songfind Quiz. Of course, the only downside is you’ll need to win the competition without the help of Songfind for now.