Making the business case for better trailer music

The creative team has found the song. It gives the trailer exactly the feeling they were looking for. Then comes the budget question: what will spending more on music actually deliver?

It’s a fair question. If you’re investing in a film and paying to get it in front of an audience, the music deserves to be considered within that whole investment. It can shape the pace, personality and emotional pull of the work people will see.

At Clear Music, our clients often already believe this. The challenge is giving the person signing off the budget a clear reason to back the idea.

Give the music a job

Start with what the campaign needs. Recognition in the opening seconds? An emotional turn? A distinctive attitude? A connection with a particular community?

Recognizable songs come with history. A voice, melody or lyric can bring back a personal memory or suggest a world before the trailer has explained it. A cover can keep that recognition while introducing a new performance. Original music can give the campaign an identity of its own.

The useful budget conversation is about what each option contributes, what it costs to use across the planned campaign, and why it suits the audience. Fame alone doesn’t justify the choice.

Two songs, two sides of CONTROL Resonant

For Remedy Entertainment’s CONTROL Resonant, we worked on music research, supervision and clearance for two trailers with very different musical identities.

The Prodigy’s “Omen” accompanies the “Altered State” trailer. Its electronic pulse and intensity give the action pressure and momentum. The Cardigans’ “My Favourite Game” drives the launch trailer, bringing a different kind of urgency through its guitar hook and vocal character.

For me, what makes these choices interesting is how naturally they belong in Remedy’s strange world. They have their own personalities, and those personalities become part of the films. The music gives someone another way into the game.

We took a different route with our Depeche Mode cover for Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. Reinterpreting “Enjoy the Silence” let us work with a familiar composition while shaping the performance around the trailer’s emotional direction.

These are different creative reasons to invest in music. Each gives the internal pitch something specific to explain.

What the research helps us understand

There is useful evidence behind those decisions.

Attention and emotional connection. Nielsen’s analysis of more than 600 TV ads found stronger emotional and communication responses to ads featuring music. David Allan’s advertising experiment found advantages for popular-song vocals on attention and memory compared with instrumental treatments or no popular music.

Personal memory. Research published in Psychology & Marketing, involving over 1,200 participants, explored how songs from people’s formative years affect advertising responses through familiarity, preference and memories. That gives music selection a useful question: what does this song mean to the people we want to reach?

The right fit. An experiment with 178 participants found that better musical fit improved ad and product attitudes, memory and purchase intention. MassiveMusic’s research with the IPA also linked music responses across 150 ads to campaign business results.

These studies have different methods and limitations. Most concern advertising rather than game trailers, and the IPA findings are associations across existing campaigns. They support a case for attention, emotion and memory, without giving us a guaranteed sales uplift for a particular song.

Listen to the audience, then measure further

In our work, views, comments and engagement are often the most useful visible starting points. On many projects where we license a song or produce a cover, some of the top comments are specifically about the music. I’d encourage anyone making the internal pitch to look at the reactions under the CONTROL Resonant trailers.

That response is valuable, but views also reflect the game, creative, distribution and media spend. Comments represent part of the audience. Detailed campaign data usually stays internal, so isolating music’s contribution is harder.

Where possible, compare viable music options with the intended audience. Look at retention, game recall and qualified store visits alongside views and comments. Remembering the song should help people remember the game.

Music can create another campaign moment

An artist partnership can also give a team more to work with: an original release, a performance, a behind-the-scenes film, or a collaboration connecting different musical cultures.

That is part of what interests me about Rockstar’s music strategy for GTA VI. There is room to build an idea around music and give it a life beyond one trailer. Artist participation and promotional support need to be agreed as part of the plan.

Bring a proposal to the budget meeting

A strong internal pitch should answer five questions:

• What does this music contribute to the idea?
• Why will it connect with this audience?
• Which alternatives have we compared?
• Which campaign assets and rights does the budget cover?
• What result will we measure?

There are several ways to reach an interesting result: an original recording, a cover, a bespoke track or a familiar public-domain composition. Explore those routes while the idea is taking shape.

At Clear Music, we help turn that idea into a feasible proposal, with creative options, rights requirements, production and costs. Bring us the brief early, and we can help build a case your team can take into the budget meeting.