Music House Profile: Amber Music — Sleeping with the Madison Avenue Enemy

January 8th, 2012 by Trenton

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TRIBECA, MANHATTAN: In the sometimes posh neighborhood known as TriBeCa, war is being waged. The rebel base? An attitudinal sound house known as Amber Music.

Awards are nice -- but Amber Music has its eyes on other prizes in today's chaotic commercial music world. (photo credit: Jennie Armon)

Commander-in-chief of the determined musical crew is Michelle Curran, an intense commercial music veteran who’s unafraid to attack any situation with both guns blazing. Gifted with the ability to attract top composing and sound design talent and direct it to cinematic heights for her advertising clients, Curran is challenged by a constantly contracting business environment where deadlines and budgets loom ever-tighter.

Even as the bullets fly, Amber Music stands as something to aspire to – and then some – in the ultra-competitive music realm. Operating out of a spacious, multi-studio complex downtown while working consistently with clients from California to Europe, Amber sports a reel bursting with top brands: Gatorade, Tropicana, Budweiser, and Motorola (the 2011 Super Bowl spot “Empower the People”), just to name a few.

Making the work happen is a choice list of composers and sound designers, including Andrew Brannon, Eugene Cho, Danny De Matos, Leo Sidran, and Mark Tewarson, among others. Many more have had Amber as their launch pad before setting up their own HQ’s.

It may sound like an NYC success story, but all is not rosy in Amber-land. Overall economic embattlement forced the 2010 closing of her original London office (founded in 1993), along with the L.A. offices. Uncommonly plain-spoken about the trials and travails that original music houses – in NYC and elsewhere – face today, the energetic Curran first takes on the obstacles by understanding what Amber Music isn’t.

Make Songs, Not Jingles

“We don’t do jingles,” says Curran, “’Trust Sleepy’s for the rest of your life!’ That’s a jingle. It’s a little ditty song that goes along with an ad. I’m not saying that jingles aren’t right in the right place. If I said, ‘Think of an ad from your childhood,’ you’d recall a piece that stuck in your head. It becomes an earworm.

“To us, advertising music is like creating music for film. We make songs, and we make music, but we don’t do jingles here. There are places that do that really, really well. But that’s not us. I’m not a jingles producer. I’m a person that creates music for film, and I try to understand my role as a creative director, or interpreter of people’s ideas. People know why they want to work with me, or don’t want to work with me.”

A sweet suite: Inside composer Eugene Cho's creative space. (photo credit: Jennie Armon)

Feisty and unapologetically opinionated, the UK-native kicked off her career in the ‘80’s, moving from dancer to assistant art buyer (quite handy for storyboarding later on), to running the jingle house for London-based ATV Music. Decca Records was next, which led to a head-of-promotions post at Island Records, where producing music videos for artists from U2 to Grace Jones and Bob Marley helped lock sound-to-picture in her head.

For the independently-inclined Curran, her own shop was a logical next step, resulting in the 1993 launch of Amber Music. “It was just going to be a little London office,” she recalls, “but then it seemed not-very-gracious to not have an American composer. So then I had to build a studio in NYC, and it kind of grew from there. In 2000, we opened up in LA. But then the whole world turned upside down, and technology ramped up. Now we haven’t got the budgets for three offices anymore. There were big budgets and big jobs, but now budgets have been shrink shrink shrink.”

Survival Tactics in a Tight Market

So how has Amber not only survived, but emerged as one of the benchmarks for original ad music, sound design and music supervision in an era of not only shrinking budgets, but also complete readiness by creative directors and artists alike to license tracks? To Curran, it boils down to ensuring that the best is still available, and managed by someone with experience who can provide serious guidance to the client and her roster.

“If you go to Amber, or one of the other ‘really good’ quality music companies, you’re paying for the best talent, hopefully,” she says, “but also for someone like myself to get on the phone and give you ideas for your spot.”

For Curran, one key aspect of achieving and maintaining a distinctive level of quality is to use freelance composers as seldom as possible. Instead, the vast majority of her composers are in-house, focused on Amber’s commercial projects while also having the OK to use their studios for independent album work and other creative projects.

“The people coming to Amber know that — with the exception of one or two people who work with me on a freelance basis — they’ll only get these people if they work for Amber,” Curran explains. “That makes it a little bit special.”

The Pitch Game

But sometimes Curran finds herself feeling a little less special, like when she finds herself in the now all-too-common situation of pitching against dozens of competitors on a project, hampered by little or no communication with the agency’s harried decision-maker.

Another reason the music is for real -- the kit gets captured in-house. (photo credit: Jennie Armon)

“Sometimes I don’t even get to speak to the creatives, because they don’t have time to speak to me,” says Curran, “which I think is bizarre because this is a commercial that’s going to be pictures and music. If people don’t think you’re important enough to talk to you about that, well…

“It’s not about giving people 8 million demos,” she continues. “It’s about bringing it back down to a much more realistic thing. It should be the creative who has enough foresight to say, ‘I’ll go to three different companies, and I’ll get three or four tracks.’ Music is the only part of the industry where people give you very little time, and definitely very little respect. They don’t go to an editor’s place and say, ‘I don’t like the edit, so I’m going off somewhere else.’ But that’s what they do in this sector.”

While it would be easy for Curran to blame unnamed Madison Avenue cads as the cause, she instead urges her fellow original music purveyors to take a look into the mirror. “We’ve done this to ourselves as an industry,” she points out. “For example, we agree to not use our demos for six months, in case they want to hold onto them. Nobody wants to say ‘no,’ nobody wants to bite the bullet and say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not giving me enough money for this.’ No one wants to lose it. Ad agencies say, ‘We don’t care about you, because there’s a million other companies.’ ‘Oh really? Thank you!’

“There used to be a time back in the day, where you’d evolve music along with the creatives and the director to make something special. I can look back at music from the ‘80s and ‘90s and say, ‘That still works now.’ Today, we have to fight for our industry — fight for the life of our industry. Because otherwise in a few years, what are all the composers going to do? You can’t make money off of records anymore, unless you have some hits.”

The Keys to Keeping on Top of Music Quality

Fortunately for the composers and sound designers that work with Amber, they’ve got a field general with the confidence to keep it together, even in the heat of battle. As one example of the Amber ethos check out the emotional motion of the Motorola Super Bowl spot, which depends hugely on the powerfully graceful score from Icelandic composer Biggi Hilmars – it’s a cinematic, yet often subtle musical work that helps keep the viewer fully engaged with the onscreen action.

The common thread between this and other high-profile campaigns that Amber handles? “Me,” Curran states simply. “I’m really Amber. I always say to my composers, it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. You don’t have to write 800 tracks. You just have to write one really well.

“When I’m looking at composers I want to bring in, they have to have a finesse to them. Amber is a brand, and the things that come out from here have to be a part of that brand. If it’s quick, horrible, cheap and nasty, I don’t want to be a part of it. That’s not who we are. Some people think my sound is overly produced, but that’s what I espouse to people.

“When I was in charge of doing promos at Island, I’d go, ‘I want a director for the video to be able to stand up outside the music.’ In the other way around, I want the music to be able to stand up if you’re not watching the picture. It should be solid — the craft is a well-executed piece of music. What someone said we do here is intelligent music. The way we look at things is in an intelligent manner.”

Apparently the downside to a smart outlook can be a polarizing image – but this is a drawback she and her staff are willing to live with. “Some people find me too opinionated,” she concedes. “Too strong and outspoken. Some people don’t want that. Some people want you to just do as you’re told. But if I think someone’s not giving us a good idea, and I think there’s a better idea, I’ll say that.”

Multi-instrumentalist Mark Tewarson is on the Amber Music roster. (photo credit: Jennie Armon)

Surveying the current advertising industry landscape, whether uptown at Madison Avenue or globally, Curran finds the same pressures in the industry as from decades past – just severely amplified. In response to the increased heat, she sees one true option.

“Has it changed very much? No it hasn’t,” she says. “As music companies who specialize in doing music for TV commercials, we are against much stronger competition from EMI, and everyone else who wants to do it. You have to make your standards better. When people are yapping at your ankles, you have to produce a better quality product, and I think because of that the standards of music have gotten better.

“And also because now that commercial music is deemed not such a dirty word, people like a Zach Shipps (guitarist for indie rock outfit Electric Six) are quite happy to supplement their income, plus their creativity, on doing a composition which is a breakaway from producing an album track or a band. Paul McCartney said in article in NME that writing a :30 piece of music was the hardest thing he ever had to do, because he had to make a beginning, middle and end in thirty seconds. There is an art to that.

“What I think is very undervalued is how talented the composers have to in order to pull a song or tune to picture out of their asses inside of 24 hours, that fits to what everybody wants. Bang bang bang you’ve got to come up with an idea! It’s not that easy for people to do. People should respect the composers within the industry in which we work, with higher regard than they do most of the time.”

Composing is a Battlefield — Keep Battling On

Having loved – and left – L.A., Curran sees NYC as the ideal home base for anyone in the commercial world. And while she clearly likes the place, it’s the time that’s just as right for her. “It’s very centrally based time-wise,” she notes. “At the moment its ten-past 9:00 in L.A., in London its ten-past 4:00, in Israel its ten past six, and in Auckland it’s ten past 5:00 tomorrow morning. But I think L.A. is the last time zone before you slip off the planet, isn’t it?”

Kickin' it old skool -- Amber Music has some hard-won TriBeCa turf to protect. (photo credit: Jennie Armon)

With the 20th anniversary of Amber Music on the horizon, Curran is ready, willing, and able to look past the headaches of decades past and stay connected to the most rewarding moments of the business. “When we’ve done a great piece of music, we look at it on TV, and we know we’ve done a great job,” says Curran. “You’ve managed to do something where people say, ‘You did that?’ It’s pride.

“I love the job that I do. There are days where working at the sweet counter at Woolworths would be better, but I love working to picture. And however all these things come to me, I love being able to look at something, come up with an idea and make something better. A great piece of music will elevate an average commercial, whereas an average piece of music can destroy a spot.”

But all emotion aside, what really seems to keep Michelle Curran and her Amberites moving is her tribal mentality, working in a sonic war zone where aesthetics and artillery have become necessarily intermingled.

“It’s about survival now,” she says. “Unfortunately, it’s a never-ending battle — you have to do twice as much work for half as much money now. But as you can see, I care about my industry a lot. I don’t want to see our craft die. And the only way to keep this art form alive is to fight.”

— David Weiss