Music for CLASS on Class

I’m producing a new podcast miniseries for a think tank, the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (or CLASS for short), with Huw Jordan and the presenter Dr Faiza Shaheen. It’s an attempt to move past the superficial discussion of class politics we’ve had in Britain since the Brexit vote. We’re calling it CLASS on Class.

One of the constraints of the relatively low-budget projects I work on – and of podcasts in general, for dull and annoying licencing reasons – is that the obvious commercial music choices are difficult or costly to use. Otherwise I’d probably be using wall-to-wall Philip Glass, though I’m sure the world doesn’t particuarly need more of that.

Another affordable and more straightforward option would be royalty-free music libraries, which contain music often produced specifically to be used as generic music beds for video. Let me know if you find a good one. I’m still looking.

Big public Creative Commons libraries, then (like Free Music Archive) end up being essential, both for the simplicity of the licencing and the sheer breadth of weird stuff they contain.

Lots of the top-ranked tracks are either unsuitable for the kind of podcasts I make, or overused by other producers. So I end up spending a lot of time searching random keywords, hoping to find something usable, and adding tracks to my own production library with tags that inevitably make no sense to me when I eventually use the track for something 9 months later. There are a few big artists with Creative Commons releases, like Nine Inch Nails, but a fair bit of the music I use isn’t on Spotify or Apple Music or even for sale anywhere. I’ve used tracks that have had fewer than 100 plays, including a bunch of stuff by Ecuadorian artists for our Weekly Economics Podcast episode on then-leader Rafael Correa’s radical economic policies.

Maybe I still make choices that sound clichéd to fit with my idea of what a modern, post-Radiolab podcast should sound like. Who knows. My sense though is that these constraints mean I have to make more unusual music decisions at least some of the time, which is no bad thing.

In summary: Philip Glass is good, but so are constraints.