Genre
Records made to be used, not listened to. Commissioned music for film and television, sold from a catalogue, now hunted like treasure.
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Genre Library
Jonny Trunk
Trunk Records
Jonny Trunk picked up a Bosworth LP by accident, knocked on the company's door in Soho, and ended up running a label. Thirty years later, a study built on a billion listening events explains why records like that one stay invisible to a recommender.
Genre Library
De Wolfe and KPM
Music to catalogue
In the autumn of 1973 the best selling record in Britain was the theme to a television detective series, credited to a composer who did not exist. Behind it sits a trade already sixty years old: writing music to catalogue for whoever needs it, and never putting it on sale.
Monograph Library
Piero Umiliani
Sound Work Shop
On 27 December 1968 he bought a few rooms in the Trionfale district of Rome and filled them with a Hammond C-3, ten Neumann U87s and the first synthesisers shipped in from the United States. Out of that room came up to twelve records a year, pressed in three hundred copies and signed with names that were not his.
Genre Library
Italian library
The sonorizzazioni of Piero Umiliani and Alessandro Alessandroni, made for a catalog rather than a film, became a mine for collectors and producers worldwide.
Library music was never sold in shops. Between the sixties and the eighties, houses like KPM in England or Octopus in Italy pressed records available only to television and film producers: themes, stings, moods, catalogued by use and by length. The composer was paid once and moved on to the next record.
The constraint produced freedom. With no audience to win over and no label asking for a single, those writers tried things no commercial release would have allowed: abstract electronics, awkward jazz, percussion with no tune on top. That is why library became the favourite seam for hip hop producers and collectors, and why we keep coming back to it.