What is Production Music vs. Popular Music? Understanding Licensing, Costs, and Creative Use

When working in creative content production, there can be a lot to learn when it comes to music. Of course, providing an engaging and impactful soundtrack to your projects is crucial, but it can honestly be confusing just trying to find where to look for such high-quality music.

On top of it all, there are many confounding terms that often don’t mean what they sound like they mean. From “royalty free music” not actually being free to “popular” music not only being the pop songs currently topping the charts, there are a lot of misconceptions to clear up and demystify.

So, to help you on your own music licensing journey of understanding, let’s go over some of the nuances between “popular music” and “production music” and explore how you can start better understanding—and ultimately using—both for your projects.

Popular Music vs Production Music

When looking to license music, popular music usually represents music from top labels and publishers. While popular songs are often available for sync licensing, it isn’t their primary use case. So these tracks go through a nuanced negotiation, resulting in a unique license for each buyer to use the music in their project.

Production music, on the other hand, is music that has specifically been recorded for sync licensing, usually by a music house that specializes in sync. For this reason, it tends to follow a more direct, simplified, and cost-effective licensing process.

Both popular music and production music are great options for creatives–which you use depends on a few different factors, like whether a song or artist is central to your story or more of a supporting character. 

(To see this popular-versus-production decision-making in progress, look no further than commercials that air during the Super Bowl each year, with many brands and agencies choosing to license popular songs that are key to the storylines of their ads. You can read more about the art of choosing music for commercials here.)

Popular music includes more familiar (and, dare we say, popular) names, whereas production catalogs might be lesser known but also more tailored for video and other creative needs.

What is popular music?

We all know what popular music is, right? It’s the latest Grammy-winning artists, like Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter. It’s also The Beatles, Björk, and Bach. Popular music includes everything that’s widely known and accepted among the general music-consuming public—but it’s actually broader than that. 

Music originally composed, recorded, and sold to be listened to—whether in concert, on the radio, or through a streaming service like Spotify—is considered “popular,” “mainstream,” or “commercial.”

For example, this 2024 Volkswagen "Water Girl" commercial featuring the song “Magalenha” by Sergio Mendes is a good illustration of how popular music isn’t necessarily what’s “popular” today; “Magalenha” came out in 1992. 

Historically, licensing popular music for projects has always been handled by the labels and publishers that release it. Because these rightsholders monetize their catalogs in many different ways–including album sales, streaming royalties, and sync–licensing deals tend to be complex as the values of songs change over time and activity in one channel impacts others. 

This complexity, and the fact that rightsholders don’t have to license their music to make money, generally makes popular music licenses more expensive than production music licenses. 

What is production music?

Production music, on the other hand, has a history that’s tied to different types of projects that make use of music. From film and television to commercials and digital ads to YouTube and TikTok videos, production music covers a wide range of content types. And it tends to be more affordable and accessible than popular music, since sync licensing is its primary revenue stream.

Sometimes, it’s hard to distinguish production music from popular music—it spans hundreds of genres, can have vocals and lyrics, and can be just as catchy as anything you hear on the Top 40. 

However, unlike popular music, production music is composed specifically to meet the needs of creators. A production track’s arc, instrumentation, length, lyrics (if present), and so on are all quite intentional, ensuring the song will fit naturally into various projects.

Here’s an example of a Rawlings ad that uses production music: the electrifying rap track “Hero” by Soundstripe artist Gee Smiff. 

As you can see, the spot is a good illustration of how production music is changing. Thanks to the rise of influence culture, social media, and short-form video, demand for production music is higher than ever before, ushering in new artists, fresh voices, and innovative providers (like Soundstripe).  

How to license popular music and production music in your projects

If you’re looking to license music for your projects, there are more options and avenues than ever before. However, whether you’re looking for popular or production music, each pathway has been streamlined for you.

The first avenue for most creatives and content creators will be royalty free music, production music that is pre-cleared for all your marketing, streaming, and broadcast needs. Soundstripe’s royalty free music catalog includes over 10,000 high-quality tracks and covers a wide range of styles, genres, and other filterable categories.

With the new Soundstripe Market, which is currently in beta, rightsholders across the industry, from leading labels to boutique music houses, can now simplify licensing their music for ads, YouTube videos, social media posts, and other content.

As the pioneering digital music licensing storefront for creatives of all types, Soundstripe Market already offers thousands of pre-cleared music tracks from top record labels, publishers, and artists—both of the popular and production variety—and we’re just getting started.

If you’d like to try out a simplified new music licensing process, whatever your soundtrack needs, check out Soundstripe Market Beta here.