You know this piece of music, right? You know from where it originates? Except I'm 99.999% sure you don't. It's called Frolick, and it's composed by Luciano Michelini. Luciano wrote Frolick in the 1970s for an Italian film called La Bellissima Estate, or the Beautiful Summer. From there it was added to various music libraries and ended up being used in lots of commercials here in the US. One day Larry David saw one such commercial for a bank. He liked the music, filed it away, and when it came time to pick a theme song for his HBO comedy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, he chose Frolick. And from there it became the soundtrack to A Million Me, shorthand for walking yourself into an especially awkward or embarrassing situation. Frolick might be the most famous piece of what is sometimes called library music, background music, sync music, or just sync. And on Today Explained, we are living in peak sync. Support for the show comes from Dell. Remember Dell? Dell PCs with Intel Inside are built for the moments you plan. Still, and the ones you don't. Still, they're there for those late night study sessions when you get to the cafe and there's no outlets, all that stuff. Dell is built to adapt to you. It's built with long lasting batteries, you're not scrambling for an outlet, and built in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.co.uk forward slash dellpcs, built for you. Support for this show comes from Grow Therapy. If you're not feeling the spring energy yet, don't worry, you're not behind. With Grow Therapy, you can start small, like talking to someone who gets it. Whatever challenges you're facing, Grow Therapy is here to help. Grow accepts over 100 insurance plans. Sessions average about $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as $0, depending on their plan. You can visit Grow Therapy dot com slash Vox today to get started. That's Grow Therapy dot com slash Vox. Grow Therapy dot com slash Vox. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Today Explained. My name is Ryan Francis Bradley. I am a writer, mostly for the New York Times Magazine, mostly these days about music. And you recently went on a little journey with a branch of music called Sink Music. Where did it begin? Right. So it began, as things do, with my wife and I watching Love Island. Tonight. There was this song that came on that sounded like a pop song. It was a pop song. But it was like very weirdly specific to the moment in Love Island. And I was like, what is this song? As one does, I pulled out Shazam on my phone and tried to Shazam it and nothing came up. And I was like, that's strange. And I did some digging around various streaming services and tried to search the lyrics and couldn't find it. Found a Reddit thread about other people asking about this song. What the song that starts to play when they call up the ladies and Austin gets the first text? Shazam, Google and chat GPT fail me. And I was like, what is what is this song? And then I just started calling people and asking them about what this was. And then I found this whole world of sync music. Did you ever find out what the song was? Yeah. Yeah. It's a song called Loves of War. Okay, you hear the song Love is a War while watching Love Island with your wife. You end up going on this whole journey and discover a whole world of music called sync. Tell us about sync. I like to say sync is a genre described by its function. So it kind of contains all genres, all sounds in music, but its function raised to always be paired to video. So it can sound wildly different. And I mean, the best way to think about sync isn't just in the song, the kind of pop songs you hear in reality TV. My diamond earring came up in the ocean and it's gone. And there's people that are dying. Tell Amanda to call me. I'll give her all the dirt on set me. The music you hear behind tutorials on YouTube or TikTok. These very cliche sounds and there's trends, right? Like I would say in the sort of late 2010s, a big sound in this sort of background to video sync was like ukulele, sort of indie pop sound. And now it's become a lot more kind of electronic. There's this great playlist of friend and editor, friend of mine sent. You call it like music for corporate and technology. That's just like kind of electronic, kind of soft electronic, the back behind like corporate videos. You know, sync often follows trends in the mainstream music. Like a lot of pop now is a bit more electronic than it is ukulele. So thank God. We use music in the background of our interviews and in our billboards at the top of the show. And most often it's made by an alien known as the mysterious brake master cylinder. Is that sync music? I would say so. I mean, if he's making it to be paired to audio, which I mean, that's the beginning of sync, right? The roots of sync have like this purpose built music for radio. For a long time it was called library music and still is sometimes called library music or production music. A lot of the library music that was made in the 60s and 70s and a little bit in the 80s when there were a lot more kind of musicians on staff studio musicians. And when they weren't sitting around making a record for artists, they would make library music. And so there's really a, like this is kind of Craig Diggers' gold mines of all of this music that was made by really serious amazing musicians making music to sit in a library and potentially get picked up and used in a TV show or commercial. You know, nowadays that whole sort of ecosystem where you would have studio on staff studio musicians is pretty rare. Someone who just hangs out at a studio and is like a hand for whatever anyone needs on a given day. Yeah. And it's an end and that's like a nine to five job. I mean, the vast majority of musicians are independent contractors. And so early on in my reporting, I was talking to a musician who is nine to five, he's an independent contractor and his nine to five is making sync music. And he described it to me. I was like, I'm so interested in exploring this kind of corner of the music industry. And he's like, let me stop you there, man. This is, this is the music industry. For a lot of us, this is how we make, make it work. Does that mean that in some ways, considering how much video we consume right now that we're sort of in the era of, I don't know, peak sync? I would say so. I mean, certainly in terms of the number of tracks available and the number of tracks that are being made, I think there's a whole lot of young people trying to break in to sync and make and make a living that way. There are also very serious record producers who describe to me sync as their 401k. It's like their, their retirement plan because they can steadily make sync music and then still be waiting for that, you know, once or twice a year working on a big record and having a big payday. And with the like omnipresence of sync music in our current day, is it affecting what pop music sounds like? So I, I sort of think so. What was really interesting to me was that because we live in this age where we're drowning in video and a lot of people encounter new songs through video platforms, video forward platforms, a lot of the tricks of sync have influenced how pop music is made in a way. I mean, there's, there's an interesting kind of gray area between what is a sync track and what is a pure pop song and what is working for pop often now has a lot of is kind of borrowing a lot of the moves from sync, where you have these instrumental breaks between lyrics and you have this like orchestral build. One of the most successful sync tracks last year, which is just kind of based off of how often it was used to back videos on TikTok and also in commercials. Zara Larson by a lot of metrics, the kind of the biggest sync track of 2025. And I think that she very cannoli is putting out music that works really well with video. And, you know, whether or not she's, I think it's fair to say that she set out to make a really successful pop song and did. And part of its success, a large part of its success, I would say, is that it works really well with video, that it builds orchestrally, that it has these nice instrumental breaks to lyrics and is picking up a lot of the tricks that sync music producers have long used, like having a longer instrumental intro and a longer instrumental outro and making sure that it builds and it has these big hits and these like breaks. Right? There's like a there's a very interesting thing I would say in pop now where big pop songs really need a like 15 to 30 second moment that like really works on video. And that is what where it gets used on TikTok. And that is how it becomes a hit. Oh, it's starting to sound sad, Ryan. You know, like, like this is really good for musicians because it helps them pay the bills. But is it flattening music? Man, I love two minds about this. I think you can get like depressed about how music, where music is today and how it's starting to sound the same and how you do. I feel on the other hand, I'm kind of like music has always reflected where culture is and and music has always tried to musicians have always tried to craft songs that are going to be wildly popular and get heard. And if this is the way to do it, then so be it. I will say after reporting this, look, I'm a middle aged music snob. And a lot of this a lot of this stuff. I was a little snooty about going into the reporting. And then, you know, no surprise, you get into it and you talk to the people behind these tracks and you see that they're coming at it with real intent and real interest and, you know, real the real like human thing that makes music interesting to other humans. And it became a lot more interesting to me. And it made me understand pop music that I was a little dismissive of a little bit better and appreciate it a little bit more. Oh my gosh, we didn't do the thing. The elephant in the room. There is a major elephant in the room. I think you cannot pay. But it's like, no, I'm here and I'm here to stay and I'm here to F your S up. And that elephant, of course, is artificial intelligence. Of course, of course. The elephant when today explained returns. So before today explained comes from grow therapy. What does it grow? Spring can be a good time to clean out some of the cobwebs and escape the funk left by that seasonal effect of disorder. Grow therapy can help. 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That's joined delete me.com slash today code today. Vo Williams is a certified sync musician. We asked him if that was like a thing he dreamt of doing when he was growing up. No, no, actually it was completely by accident. You know, my career was on that very like traditional trajectory, making music, trying to make a hit song, get on the radio, blow up like that, you know. And I said yes to a music session one day and that session ended up being the first song that I ever had placed on television. What was it called and where to get placed? Yeah, so the song is actually called Light them up. It's been placing over 700 to 800 different things. Yeah. So yeah, so the way that I even the way that I discovered that I was even doing this because in the beginning I didn't even know I was I was being making sync music. I was just making this hybrid form of hip hop, which we call Epic Hip Hop today. Okay. With us with us being the pioneers of that of that actual genre. But I had no idea that it would be consistent with the music that we were doing. I had no idea that it would be considered kind of like the cornerstone of the way hip hop sounds in sync. My music is meant to drive stadiums to to resonate across arenas and baseball fields. It's meant to like, you know, you need like your biggest star of the year jumping out of a helicopter and then explodes and then my song carries the weight. Give us some specifics where people potentially heard your music. This song or others? If you watched the 2024 Olympics, the Italian women's gymnastics team did their bronze metal winning routine to my song, Greatness. If you went to the Super Bowl, you may have heard my song underlay. So when they did the big presentation for the second half of the Super Bowl, my song underlay was was ringing out in the stadium and all of the media was cut to that song underlay if you went to the Super Bowl this past year. So Bad Bunny kind of opened up for you at the Super Bowl. Yeah, I don't know. Bad Bunny stuck around after performing to hear underlay. If you've been to the Lakers game in the past couple years, if you've been to a Tampa Bay Lightning game, Milwaukee Bucks, I had the the season anthem for their championship winning year and also perform live in the finals when they when they won the championship. I literally could go on and on, man. I mean, the music is everywhere. When one of your songs gets gets placed 700, 800 times, how much money do you make? Oh, wait. I think right now I have well over 3000 individual sinks, right? So that's the license. That's like, OK, we're going to use your song, you know, name a TV show, right? We're going to use your song in your favorite TV show. Heated rivalry. OK, we're going to use your song in heated rivalry, right? I'm coming to the cottage. That counts as one. That doesn't mean that it's it's only been seen one time, right? It could air until infinity. Until infinity. So each time that it actually shows or each time that it airs, I get paid on the back end through what's called the performance rights organization. And that's your that's your your your check in the mail, right? It's it's a little less predictable in term of the rates. You know, you're happy to get it. And that's your world to check that you get every quarter. Also on the front end, in order for them to use our music, that is valued at a sink fee rate. Those can vary anywhere between, you know, 10,000 to 500,000, depending on the type of usage and how they want to move forward with that. OK, so you do all right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm blessed for sure. Yeah, praise God. We've established that this was not what you set out to do. However, it's where you ended up and it's been real good to you. But we've talked on this show about how AI is making it so much easier for people to create their own music with a simple prompt. Music creation songwriting, in a way, has been cheapened. You're right. We're in a revolutionary moment. This is the steam engine. This is this is the wheel. This is fire. This is the internet, right? And and I would say that I would say for me, the feeling is is no fear. I absolutely have zero fear about AI and zero. And I I have I have zero fear. I mean, that blows my mind, though, because if I go to Suno and I say, Suno, give me an epic rap song. Dreams in my pocket, they spoke. Kid, you were built for the smoke. I go to some library and I look up Vo Williams epic rap song. We go further. We go harder. Push past the limit. You know the difference. Maybe I know the difference. But like 99 percent of humanity probably doesn't know the difference, because as you've laid out here, this is going on some bumper at the Super Bowl or in the background of some commercial or, you know, behind some TV show where something else is happening. And you don't feel any fear that this might put you out of work one day. No, sir. The reason why I don't fear it is because less. And yes, I agree. Most likely technology will advance to a level where the music is so natural sounding, a music bed, something that is like, you know, it doesn't really have any value. They just need some music right there. It's going to be tough. That that part of the industry is going to get challenged. And it's going to be about stepping it up. There's no more artists that we made a lot of money. Sometimes 10 percent, 15 percent of our catalog was us just dialing it in to fulfill some some corporate like emotionless, like music bed part or bumper part. That part is going to get challenged. So what's going to have to happen is musicians are going to have to step up and get even better, get even more creative, become even more amazing. It's an incredible opportunity for the for the tide to rise and for us to have to get up and work out. Now we got to work out. We can't lay around anymore. And it's it's not only not only is it a good thing for not only is it a good thing for for us as individual artists, because now we have to try try and we have to think and we have to get creative again. Right. But it's a great thing for music and music listeners, because now you're going to have this renaissance of artists who are just trying to do something so fresh that a data set, a data set doesn't have it yet. If you if you have the most advanced technology, the most advanced music AI come out tomorrow, that 100 percent of that music will always be behind me because that music is built on a data set and data is the past. By no means am I an advocate for AI. I am not an advocate for AI. I just don't fear it. What I'm an advocate for is human beings and human creation, human ingenuity, human resilience. This is what I'm an advocate for. We must go on despite what was set before us. We must push forward and go on. Now it's about it's about what are we going to do? What are we going to change? What are our value sets? How do we redefine not just how we beat the robot in terms of just the way that it sounds? What are other things that we can push forward as our value to offer the world, other human beings, a new a new value for us as musicians? There's so many different things that a person that a human being can do, can physically walk the earth and speak to you as a from human being, a human being that the AI cannot do. Give us a vote William song to go out on. We got to go out on a vote Williams track. Wow. Oh my goodness. No pressure, bro. Let's go greatness. We're going out on greatness. Vote Williams. Thank you so much, man. Thank you so much, man. The stories are going to be told. This is what legends are born. We pay for the road. The future that favors the road. Break the rules. Break the laws. This is the moment we change it all. Break the rules. Break the laws. This is the moment we change it all. Yeah. Greatness. Yeah. Vote Williams. Optimism personified. Earlier in the show, you heard from Ryan Francis Bradley. He wrote, it's the music you hear all day without ever noticing for the New York Times magazine. Shout outs to family for sharing that one with us. Shout outs to Ariana Spuru for making today's show. Amina Alsati for editing. Gabriel Dunnita for accuracy. David Tadashor and congratulations maybe Patrick Boyd for mixing. More team. Peter Ballinon, Rosen, Heidi Mawagdi, Miles Bryant, Daniel Huick, Kelly Wessinger, Dustin DeSoto, Abishai Artsy, Jolie Myers-Marina, Kennedy Noel King and I'm Sean Ramos from Tomorrow in the Feed. This comes America actually. Instead, it's going to talk about how immigration policy got to be so impossible to change in these United States. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can find more shows from the network at podcast.voxmedia.com. You can listen ad free by signing up at vox.com slash members. Thanks if you do. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your time. we've always done them, like all the time, right? But one thing you don't need to stick to is paying more for your wireless bill. That seems like a true say. Mint Mobile says they exist purely to solve this problem. Mint Mobile says they're offering plans starting at 15 bucks a month. All plans come with 5G high speed data and unlimited talk and text. Plus they say you can bring your own phone and keep your same number. Activate with eSIM in minutes and start saving immediately. No long term contracts and no hassle. 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