How to Get Into Sync: What the Career Actually Looks Like and Where You Start
- Matt Errington
- Apr 19
- 10 min read
By Matt Errington - music industry educator and co-founder of Xpandr, currently teaching music business strategy to emerging sync, publishing, and management professionals across the UK.
A career in sync means licensing music for TV, film, advertising, and games - working between creative teams, rights holders, and music supervisors to match the right track to the right moment. Roles exist at publishers, labels, sync agencies, and production music libraries. Entry-level positions are genuinely accessible, the knowledge base is learnable, and the career ladder within sync is one of the more clearly defined in the whole industry. Most people start before they feel ready.
Sync job listings almost always say the same thing. "Passion for music essential." "Must have genuine, wide musical knowledge." Sometimes: "An encyclopaedic knowledge of music a must."
What they don't say - but what every hiring manager in a sync team already knows - is that the passion is the baseline. Everyone who applies has it. What the role is actually testing is whether you understand how a brief works, what a one-stop clearance means, why metadata matters in practice, and how the rights chain moves from writer to supervisor to screen.
Most people trying to break into sync lead with music taste. The ones who get the interviews lead with the knowledge underneath it.
That's a useful place to start.
What roles actually exist in sync - and which one is right for you?
Sync is not a single job. It's a cluster of connected roles that sit across publishers, labels, sync agencies, production music libraries, and in-house supervision companies. Knowing which part of that ecosystem you're aiming for changes what experience you need to build and where you should be directing your attention.
What does a sync assistant or coordinator do?
This is the most common entry point and for good reason - it's where the practical foundations of the whole ecosystem get built. Within a sync team, a sync assistant responds to briefs, pitches repertoire, maintains relationships with music supervisors and external creative clients, and works across multiple projects simultaneously under the guidance of a more senior team.
The positive case for starting here is real: you learn the full operational chain from the inside - how briefs come in, how pitches are built and sent, how deals get negotiated and closed - while working with an established catalogue and a team around you. Most people who end up in senior sync careers look back on this period as where the genuine knowledge base was built. Within three to five years from a coordinator role, progression to senior coordinator or manager level is a realistic outcome.
What does a sync agent do?
A sync agent represents a catalogue - of artists, writers, or producers - and pitches that catalogue directly to music supervisors and creative clients. It's the most commercially relationship-driven role in the sync ecosystem. You're spending your days listening to music, understanding what supervisors are working on, and connecting the right track to the right project.
The upside is genuine: it's a commercially-focused, people-driven role that rewards people who are proactive and genuinely curious about both music and the projects it ends up in. Sync agents often work independently or within boutique agencies, which gives more autonomy earlier than a large label environment would.
What does a production music library role involve?
Production libraries are one of the most underrated routes into sync. These are companies that hold large catalogues of music specifically composed and cleared for sync use - no complex rights chains, typically one-stop cleared, built for volume.
Roles here - coordinator, metadata specialist, catalogue manager - involve organising and maintaining that catalogue, working with composers to deliver against briefs, and managing the pitching pipeline. The volume of tracks, briefs, and placements in a production library environment means you build practical experience quickly. The metadata and clearance knowledge you develop here is directly transferable to any other part of the sync industry.
What is a music supervisor and how do you get there?
The music supervisor is the creative decision-maker in a sync context - working directly with directors, producers, and advertising creative teams to identify where music is needed and what it should do. It's the most visible and most senior role in the chain, and it's where most people who love the creative side of sync want to end up.
It takes time to get there - typically several years of progression through assistant, coordinator, and manager roles first - but it's worth holding clearly as a destination, because every step of the career ladder builds something relevant towards it. The knowledge that makes a good supervisor - brief interpretation, rights fluency, deep musical breadth, strong supervisor relationships - is the same knowledge that makes a good coordinator, just applied at greater complexity and scale.
What knowledge do you actually need before you can work in sync?
Most people trying to break into sync underestimate the knowledge base required and overestimate the role of music taste. Taste matters - but it's the thing you're using once you already understand everything else.
What is a sync brief and how do you interpret one?
A sync brief describes what a supervisor is looking for: the project, the mood, the tempo, the style, reference tracks, and often a "similar to" artist as shorthand. Reading a brief well is a skill - it requires translating creative language ("heartfelt but edgy," "melancholic but not heavy") into specific musical parameters, then matching those against a catalogue efficiently and accurately.
Most people in their first sync roles are doing this under supervision. The ones who progress quickly develop an instinct for brief interpretation that goes beyond the obvious matches.
Why does rights clearance matter so much in sync?
Every sync placement requires clearance of two separate copyrights: the master recording and the musical composition. Both must be agreed before the placement can go ahead. Music supervisors strongly prefer a one-stop deal - where both rights are controlled by the same party - because it reduces the number of conversations required and removes the risk of one rights holder blocking a placement at the last moment.
Understanding where ownership sits in any given track - who controls what, how the splits are registered, whether there are co-writers with different publishers in different territories - is fundamental to doing the job properly.
"The music might be perfect for the brief. If the rights aren't clean and clearly mapped, the supervisor moves on in ten minutes. They have 40 other tracks to consider."
What is metadata and why does it matter in practice?
Metadata is the information that travels with a track - title, artist, composer credits, ISRC codes, BPM, key, mood tags, and rights ownership and contact information. In a high-volume pitching environment, supervisors work through hundreds of tracks at speed. A track with incomplete or inaccurate metadata creates friction at exactly the moment when friction costs you the placement.
This is not glamorous knowledge. It's also the kind of knowledge that distinguishes people who can actually do the job from people who are enthusiastic about music.
If you want to build the full knowledge base for a sync career - rights clearance, brief interpretation, pitching strategy, deal structures, and the commercial side of the sync ecosystem - Steve Farris leads Xpandr's Music Publishing, Sync and Licensing course for people who want to do exactly that.
How do you build real experience in sync before you have a job in sync?
This is where most people get stuck. Sync roles require experience. Experience requires having worked in sync. The way out of that loop is not to wait for a job - it's to create the conditions for experience before anyone is paying you for it.
How do independent filmmakers and content creators help you build a sync portfolio?
The most underused route into sync experience is working with people who need music and can't afford to pay market rate for it yet. Independent filmmakers, film students, documentary makers, video game developers in early development, YouTube creators building a production identity - all of these people need music placed against picture, and almost none of them have the budget to go through a formal licensing process.
Working with them gives you something no amount of reading provides: the experience of matching music to an actual brief, receiving creative feedback, navigating clearance questions on a real project, and building a track record you can reference.
One person I know who now works in sync at a mid-size production music house spent 18 months doing exactly this - pitching tracks for student films, working through clearance questions for a small documentary production company, sitting in on edits where possible. By the time she applied for her first paid sync assistant role, she had a portfolio of 14 placements across 6 projects. None of them paid more than a few hundred pounds. All of them were on her CV, with named credits. She got the job.
What are the practical steps to getting started in sync right now?
These don't require a job or a connection. They require time and consistency.
Build your brief interpretation skills - find recent sync briefs posted publicly (sync-focused forums, Reddit's r/synclicensing, social media from agents and supervisors) and practice matching tracks to them, even without pitching. Develop the habit of explaining in one sentence why a specific track serves a specific brief.
Learn the rights chain - understand who owns what in the tracks you're working with, and why. Practice mapping out the ownership structure of a song: master, composition, co-writers, publishers, territories.
Work on metadata - take a catalogue of 20 tracks you know well and build a proper metadata sheet for each one. BPM, key, mood tags, instrumentation, ISRC if available, rights contact. This is the work that nobody glamourises and that every sync employer notices immediately.
Find a filmmaker to work with - a local film school, a student filmmaker online, a YouTube creator in early development. Offer to help source music for a project. Treat it like a real brief.
Start attending - Sync Summit is the primary UK sync conference where supervisors, agents, and rights holders gather. The conversations that happen in those rooms happen nowhere else. Going once, even without industry experience, teaches you more about the real shape of the ecosystem than six months of reading.
Track the job boards - Synchtank's jobs board, Music Business Worldwide, Music Week, and UK Music all carry sync roles regularly. Reading listings even before you're ready to apply teaches you exactly what experience and knowledge is being asked for in the market right now.
What skills does a sync career actually require?
Brief interpretation - translating creative language into musical parameters quickly and accurately. Develops with practice, not study.
Multitasking under deadline pressure - sync teams work on multiple briefs simultaneously, each with its own deadline and rights chain. UK Music lists this as a core requirement at even entry level.
Negotiation - the ongoing, relationship-preserving negotiation of fees, approvals, and deal terms that happens across dozens of transactions a week. This compounds over time.
Relationship management - the ability to maintain genuine, consistent contact with supervisors, creative clients, and rights holders across years, not just transactions. Music supervisors go to their inner circle first when a brief arrives. The inner circle is built through consistent relationships, not cold outreach.
Genuine, wide musical knowledge - not just in one genre. The briefs that arrive in a sync team don't sort themselves by the music you personally love.
"Sync rewards generalists with deep pockets of specific knowledge. Someone who loves one genre and tolerates everything else will always be at a disadvantage against someone who listens widely and can explain exactly why a track serves a scene."
How do you find sync work today?
On the formal side: Synchtank's jobs board, Music Business Worldwide, Music Week, and UK Music's job profiles all carry sync roles regularly. On the informal side: the independent filmmaker route described above, Sync Summit and equivalent networking events, and building a visible presence in sync-focused communities where supervisors and rights holders interact.
Direct outreach to sync agencies and production libraries - done properly, with a demonstrated knowledge of their catalogue and a clear explanation of what you bring - also works. Most sync teams are small. A well-researched, well-written approach from someone who clearly understands the work gets noticed in a way that a generic job application rarely does.
The Breaking In course at Xpandr covers how music industry careers are built from the ground up - including sync as a career pathway and how to approach the industry from outside it.
Sync is one of the most commercially dynamic areas of the music industry right now. Streaming has expanded the demand for music in visual media significantly. The roles exist, they're growing, and the knowledge base required to compete for them is finite and learnable.
Most people who end up working in sync didn't start with connections. They started with the right knowledge, applied it somewhere real, and built from there.
Author: Matt Errington is a music industry educator and co-founder of Xpandr. He currently teaches music business strategy to emerging sync, publishing, and management professionals across the UK.
Book a call with Matt: If you want to talk through where sync fits into your career plans - or whether the course is the right next step for you - you can book a free call directly. Book a time that works for you
Sources and further reading
UK Music - Sync Assistant Job Profile The most detailed UK-specific breakdown of what the sync assistant role involves day to day - responsibilities, required skills, and who you'll be working with. ukmusic.org
Sentric - How to Land a Sync Deal in 9 Steps Practical guide to sync-readiness from one of the UK's leading independent publishing administration services - covers metadata, rights clearance, and the clearance chain. sentric.com
That Pitch - What Music Supervisors Do in Sync Licensing A clear, current explanation of the spotting session process and how supervisors source and pitch music to creative clients. thatpitch.com
Synchtank - Sync Industry Jobs Board The most consistently updated jobs board for sync-specific roles across publishers, labels, agencies, and supervision companies. synchtank.com
Go deeper with Xpandr
Music Publishing, Sync and Licensing The course led by Steve Farris covering rights clearance, sync deal structures, brief interpretation, pitching strategy, and how to build a career within the sync ecosystem. xpandr.co/music-publishing
Breaking In A complete map of how music industry careers are built from scratch - including sync as a career path and how to approach the industry from outside it. xpandr.co/breaking-in
