I stumbled upon this somehow a while back and thought I'd post it here. It gives me a new appreciation for licensing music and the music we take for granted in many hit shows. From wiki:

"De Wolfe Music is the originator of what has become known as production music as it was established in 1909 and began its recorded library in 1927 with the advent of 'Talkies'. The library consists of over 70,000 tracks, all pre-cleared for licensing and synchronisation. They have been used in thousands of productions including Monty Python, Emmanuelle, Dawn of the Dead, American Gangster and Doctor Who. Well known theme tunes include Van der Valk and Roobarb and Custard. De Wolfe built and owns Angel Recording Studios, a recording and mixing complex situated at The Angel, Islington. Artists who have recently recorded there include Snow Patrol, George Fenton (BAFTA and EMMY winner for his scores to the BBC’s ‘The Blue Planet’ and ‘Planet Earth’), Ian Brown, Elbow, The Doves, The Feeling and Kaiser Chiefs. Its specially composed department is called Inter Angel. De Wolfe is still a family run company."

and:

"De Wolfe Music Publishers have the longest running independent film and television music library resource in the world. Their music can be heard in, amongst others, The Simpsons Movie, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (film), Death Wish, Brokeback Mountain, Dawn of the Dead, American Gangster, Eastenders, Kavanagh QC, The Royle Family, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Great British Journeys, Spitting Image and Top Gear."

etc.

Thought it might be an interesting resource for people looking for samples.

Here's where you can actually search and listen to a bunch of songs in their library.
This affiliate site is related specifically to Hip Hop and features some audio.

Here's more about production music and TV themes like Monday Night Football and The People's Court.

Edited by ja_la (2 years, 2 months ago)

Thanks, interesting.

I think KPM has a similar search & listen thing on their site. There's also a lot of the green KPM 1000 Series LPs on Spotify.

Library music really interests me as a bit of a fan of the esoteric. That there was no real commercial audience means they released some really crazy music. I started a tag for library/production music a while ago, I add any I stumble across to it. I think a few other people have been using it as well which is cool.

http://www.whosampled.com/song-tag/Library/sampled/1/

Edited by cecil (2 years, 1 month ago)

Library music is awesome. KPM and De Wolfe did pretty much all of the music for Monty Python's Flying Circus and APM does all of the music for SpongeBob and MANY other cartoons like Ren & Stimpy, etc.

If you enjoy production music then you will enjoy the playlists from our fast growing production music library Audio Network at the URL below :

http://www.audionetwork.com/playlists