After "Saturday Night Fever" and the several landmark soundtrack albums in
the 80s, the big movie studios now look to soundtracks as serious
moneymakers for their movies, especially since many big movie studios are
closely affiliated with certain record companies (Sony, for example).
Electronic artists are the perfect sort of soundtrack artists from a
logistical and financial standpoint - since most electronic artists are
comprised of one person, there's no need to assemble a bunch of musicians
in a studio, wait for vocal takes, etc. Likewise, in most cases the
electronic artist is the sole songwriter for the song, so there's also no
need to wrangle about who gets what percentage of what for the song. True
most soundtrack music has nothing to do with the movie, even funny is how
the song is integrated into the movie (if at all). It used to be that a
good portion of a song would be placed prominently in a movie, now, it's
relegated to 10 seconds heard faintly from a passing car's stereo, for
example.
There's also a huge amount of politics as to where the songs go in the
movie, how much of the song is played and which songs get released as
singles...
I also think there's a huge amount of label politics as far as Jamiroquai's
concerned...my guess is that Sony UK loves Jamiroquai, while Tommy "Sleep
With Me, And I'll Make You A Star" Mottola's Sony Records USA wishes they
weren't on the roster... (Maybe Jay Kay refused to sleep with Mottola) and
apparently the whole MTV thing last year was an unexpexted and unavoidable
fluke for Sony US.
Elson
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:. e l s o n t r i n i d a d
:. elson@westworld.com :. www.westworld.com/~elson
:. los angeles, california, usa