We've been doing sync placement for six years. For the first four, we worked the way everyone works — build a catalogue, send it to supervisors, follow up, repeat. It's a numbers game and it produces numbers game results. Occasional placements, inconsistent fees, no relationships.

Two years ago we changed the approach entirely. We stopped sending catalogues and started having conversations.

What we found in those conversations surprised us. Music supervisors — particularly the ones working on prestige television and independent film — are not looking for tracks that sound like what's already on screen. They're looking for tracks that sound like nothing they've heard before but feel immediately inevitable once they're placed. They're looking for specificity. Texture. A sense of place.

The artists getting the most sync work right now are not the most polished. They're the most particular. A field recording from a Budapest courtyard at 3am. A synthesiser patch that sounds like a malfunctioning lift in a Berlin Plattenbau. The thing that makes a track feel unusable in a general context is often exactly what makes it perfect in a specific one.

Most artists pitch their most accessible material for sync. They send the track with the conventional structure, the familiar tempo, the clean mix. They're trying to make the supervisor's job easy. But easy is not what supervisors are paid to find. Interesting is what supervisors are paid to find.

Our advice: stop pitching your best track. Pitch your strangest one. Pitch the one you made at 2am that you weren't sure was finished. Pitch the thing that doesn't fit anywhere else.

That's the one they'll call you about.