JOHN HOULIHAN'S MISSION seemed impossible. The music supervisor for Atomic Blonde had to win over George Michael, New Order, and Public Enemy, with nothing but a little bit of cash and the promise that their music would be playing as a backdrop to Charlize Theron doing badass spy stuff in 1989 Berlin. As someone who has been soundtracking films for more than 20 years, Houlihan knew in theory how to convince them and their licensors—bartering, negotiation, outright pleading—but the soundtrack-licensing game today is much different than it when he was finding music for Austin Powers.

From the 1980s to the early 2000s, a good movie soundtrack could become the year’s greatest mixtape. In 1987, it was Dirty Dancing. In 1992, it was Singles. Pulp Fiction and Above the Rim tied for the honor in 1994. Romeo + Juliet took the cake in 1996 and so on. But as iTunes—and later, streaming services—became more prevalent, the need for movies to compile a bunch of killer tracks in a physical album release has all but vaporized. (Why buy the 8 Mile soundtrack when you can just queue up an Eminem playlist on Spotify?)

This had two distinct effects on music supervisors' jobs. First, fewer labels tried to strong-arm their hot new artists onto movie soundtracks. Second, they—and their musicians—became more amenable to licensing out their back-catalogue material, especially when physical album sales were dropping precipitously. “As the record business has segued from the brick-and-mortar thing that’s long-gone to this new digital thing, there’s been huge drops in their revenue,” Houlihan says. “Now this little side-dish thing of them giving synchronization licenses has become a lifeblood.” Both current and older artists realized that moviegoers who heard their song might be more likely to stream the rest of their body of work. And in 2017, that consideration has evolved to help make soundtracks the most vital and vibrant they've been in decades.

The Soundtrack Resurgence

One look—well, listen—at the multiplex this summer provides ample evidence. Picking up where its predecessor left off, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 had everyone humming Fleetwood Mac and Looking Glass. When Atomic Blonde drops July 28, audiences will be doing the same with 1980s classics like “99 Luftballons.” The Bad Batch is also sneaking ‘80s and ’90s goodness from Ace of Base and Culture Club into theaters (alongside some more obscure house music). And, of course, there’s Baby Driver, which screeched into theaters this week, supercharged by songs from Beck, Queen, and many others. “It’s fun, man,” Bad Batch director Ana Lily Amirpour says of Baby Driver. “It’s wall-to-wall music.” Like Dirty Dancing and Pulp Fiction before them, these movies are making cinemas pop by unearthing classics—and they’re doing it by making playlists.

And in the case of Atomic Blonde and Baby Driver, those playlists got started before the cameras even rolled. Houlihan and Blonde director David Leitch spent weeks sending each other pictures of their Sirius XM dashboard displays to suggest songs that might work. When Edgar Wright was writing the Driver script, he meticulously synced each song with the action, and he gave each actor was a CD to listen to while they read it. “Where I’m closest to [Driver protagonist] Baby is his constant looking to music for motivation,” Wright says. “The act of moving and music together is one of my favorite things.” After that, it was up the movie’s music consultant, Kirsten Lane, to secure all the tracks before they started filming. Despite a few snags—mostly involving songs with samples she couldn’t clear—Lane was able to get all the tracks Wright wanted, largely thanks to the promise that artists would have their song in an Edgar Wright film and potentially reach new listeners.

That promise of a new audience is a tough thing to turn away from, especially in the age of iTunes and streaming when even people who don’t buy a soundtrack can still put a song in rotation. This is particularly true with Baby Driver, which not only can turn younger audiences onto older songs, but ones that inspired the music they love now. Early on, for example, the movie features Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle.” If it sounds instantly recognizable to a lot of ears in the theaters, that's because it was sampled on House of Pain’s “Jump Around.” “What’s so clever is that you may not have heard of half of the tracks that are in there, but you’ve heard their hook because it’s been sampled and put into something more recently,” Lane says. “For young audiences, as well as old audiences it’s introducing people to something they maybe didn’t know existed.”

The End of the CD Boom
The method of using movies to introduce music wasn’t always the case. For years during the CD boom of the 1990s and 2000s, record companies would put up upwards of a million dollars for the rights to put out a soundtrack, but then try to use it as an opportunity to showcase some recent signees and new artists they were trying to break.

“Between 2000-2010 many, many film scenes were hurt by songs being put in there that were chasing potential commercial gain,” Houlihan says. “Film directors came to hate soundtracks. I remember I met with one director who was like, ‘I don’t want a soundtrack. I don’t want a label president telling me what’s best for my montage. They should just back the fuck up, let me do my movie, and if someone wants to put out the set of songs we do, great.’”
Now, Houlihan says, filmmakers are much more free to pick and choose what they like. Music supervisors have limited budgets without big label involvement. That which means fewer new and original songs, but now artists and music licensors are often more willing to license their music for use in movies—and if they’re not, there are indie acts ready to fill the void. (Houlihan does note, though, that the success of Deadpool’s soundtrack means he’s feeling additional pressure to come up with a second collection of songs for the sequel that has the same impact.)

This new ecosystem means soundtracks are regaining some of the glory they had back in the days of The Big Chill or The Graduate—a movie that cemented Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” in its audience’s mind, much the way Baby Driver will do with the duo’s track of same name. “There aren’t many films out there, in my opinion, that justify having a soundtrack album to accompany the film, do you know what I mean? There are so many out there that are just like Why would you want this?” says Lane. “ But there are also some classic ones out there like Dirty Dancing, Pulp Fiction, or Trainspotting where it does make you think of the entire film, and Baby Driver is definitely a have-to-have-it.” Whether you stream the official version or make your own playlist, though, is entirely up to you.



Wired