and first ever US Top 10 hit, 37 years after Running Up That Hill was first released.
“It’s hard to predict how powerful a sync will be,” says Tim Miles, SVP of sync for UK and Europe at Warner Music Group, who distribute Bush’s music . But, he says, “we did know it was going to be used a lot [in Stranger Things] and you could tell this was going to be a big moment.”, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video is unlocking enormous new opportunities for music sync, especially for catalogue titles such as Running Up That Hill.
Record company marketing activity can be planned and coordinated around a major sync, as streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music are lobbied to get behind a track. The new wildcard is TikTok: clips from shows can be decontextualised and chopped up into a variety of memes that may go viral, providing a powerful accelerant. This is something record companies cannot anticipate or manipulate.
This trend is also partly reflected in the song catalogues being bought up by companies such as Hipgnosis, BMG, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, WMG and Primary Wave. Artists such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and various members of Fleetwood Mac have sold the rights to their songs to these companies for a cash lump sum in recent years, allowing the companies to accrue future revenue from them – and syncs are a major source of that revenue.