Today, Explained - The secret soundtrack to your life

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

It's in your TV shows. It's in the ads you watch. It's in your TikToks. Sync music is everywhere, and it's changing the music industry. This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Zara Larsson performing during the Grammy Awards this year. Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Frollic, and it's composed by Luciano Michelini. Luciano wrote Frolick in the 1970s for an Italian film called La Belisima 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 U.S. One day, Larry David saw one such commercial for a bank.

He liked the music, filed it away, When it came time to pick a theme song for his HBO comedy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, he chose Frolic. And from there, it became the soundtrack to a million memes, shorthand for walking yourself into an especially awkward or embarrassing situation. Frolic 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 Sink.

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 sync music. Where did it begin? Right. So it began, as things do, with my wife and I watching Love Island. Tonight.

There was this super. that came on that sounded like a pop song. It was a pop song. Twisting night, all my love's lost in your sin. 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 like pulled out Shazam on my iPhone and tried to shazam it. And nothing came up.

And I was like, that's strange. And I did a little digging around. digging around various streaming services and like just 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 pain I was like what is what is the 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, yeah, yeah. It was a song called Love's a War. Okay, you hear this 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, right, is to always be paris.

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 with the skin. There's people that are dying. Tell Amanda to call me. I'll give her all the dirt on Suttony. The music you hear behind tutorials on YouTube or TikTok. These very kind of 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, a friend and editor friend of mine sent, You called like music for corporate and technology. That's just like kind of electronica, kind of soft electronica to 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. 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 breakmaster cylinder. Hi, it's me, breakmaster 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 it still is sometimes called library music, or pretty music. 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. Caesar sees it. And so there's really amazing, this is kind of Crate Diggers gold mines of all of this music that was made by really serious, amazing musicians.

Making music to sit in the 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 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, his 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. 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 it work. Does that mean that in some ways, considering how much video we consume right? 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 it living that way. There are also very serious record producers who described to me sync as their 401k. their 401k. It's like 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 sort of think so. What was really interesting to me was that, was that 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 this 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 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 canally 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 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 really works on video, and that is 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 this is really good for musicians because it helps them pay the bills,

but is it flattening music? Man, I'm a love of 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 a culture is 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 stuff, I was... a little snooty about going into the reporting. And then, 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 the real 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 appreciated 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. A thing 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. The elephant, when today explained returns. Support for today's explain comes from grow therapy. Hmm, what does it grow? Spring can be a good time to clean out some of the...

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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. traditional trajectory, making music, trying to make a hit song, get on the radio, blow up like that, you know. And, you know, 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 did it get placed? Yeah. So the song is actually called Light Em 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 considered kind of like the cornerstone of the way hip hop sounds in sync. My music is meant to drive stadiums, 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 it explodes. And then my song carries the weight. I'm coming for payback. Give us some specifics.

Where have people potentially heard your music, this song, or others? If you watched the 2004 Olympics, the Italian women's gymnastics team did their bronze medal winning routine to my song, Greatness. If you went to the Super Bowl, you may have heard my song Andale. So when they did the big presentation for the second half of the Super Bowl, my song Andale was ringing out in the stadium. And all of the media was cut to that song Andalay if you went to the Super Bowl this past year. They ain't got enough gold in this old town. Gotta loosen up the hold on my soul now. So Bad Bunny kind of opened up for you at the Super Bowl?

Yeah, I don't know if Bad Bunny stuck around after performing to hear Anderlay. If you've been to a Lakers game in the past couple years, if you've been to a Tampa Bay Lightning game, Milwaukee Bucks, I had the season anthem for their championship winning year and also perform live in the finals 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 placed 700, 800 times,

how much money do you make? Oh, way. I think right now I have well over 3,000 individual sinks, right? So that's the license. That's like, okay, 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. Okay, 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 only been seen one time, right? It could air 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 check in the mail, right? It's a little less predictable in term of the rates.

You know, you're happy to get it. and that's your royalty check that you get every quarter. Also, on the front end, in order for them to use our music, that is valued at a sync 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. Okay, so you do all right. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm blessed, for sure, yeah.

Praise God. We have 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 the wheel. This is fire. This is the internet. Right. And I would say that, I would say for me, the feeling is, is no fear. I absolutely have zero fear about AI and 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 good for the smoke.

I go to some library and I look up Bo Williams' epic rap song. You know the difference. Maybe I know the difference. But like, 99. 9% 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 let's, and yes, I agree, most likely technology will advance to a level where the AI 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 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%, 15% of our catalog was that just dialing it in to fulfill some corporate like, emotionless like music bed part or bumper part. That part is. 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 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. Wow. And it's not only, not only is it a good thing for, not only is it a good thing 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 have the most advanced technology, the most advanced music AI come out tomorrow, that 100% 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's set before us, we must push forward and go on. Now 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 value for us as musician? There's so many different things that a person that a human being can do who can physically walk the earth and speak to you as a new value. from human being to human being that the AI cannot do. Give us a Vo Williams song to go out on. We got to go out on a Vo Williams track. Wow. Oh my goodness. No pressure, bro. Let's go greatness.

We're going out on greatness. Vaux Williams, thank you so much, my man. Thank you so much, man. Let's go. I got a vision I see in my head. A melody buried deep into my soul. They call us crazy. We cut in the edge. Unlocking the future and letting it go. This is a calling that's higher the time we decided.

Our stories are going to be told. This is what legends are born. We pave in the road. The future that favors the world. Break the rules. Break the laws. This is the moment we change it off. Break the rules.

Break the laws. This is the moment we change it all. Yeah. Graveness. Beau 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. Shoutouts to family for sharing that one with us. Shoutouts to Ariana. for making today's show. Amina Al-Sadi for editing. Gabriel Dunita for accuracy, David Tadishore, and congratulations maybe Patrick Boyd for mixing. More team, Peter Balan-Rosen, Heidi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, Daniel Hewitt, Kelly Wessinger, Dustin DeSoto, Abishai Artsy, Jolie Myers, Miranda Kennedy, Noel King, and I'm Sean Ramos for him. Tomorrow in the Feed comes America, actually.

Estead's going to talk about how immigration policy got to be so impossible to change in these United States. Today explained is distributed by WNIC. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can find more shows from the network at podcast.com. You can listen ad free by signing up at Vox.com slash members. Thanks if you do. Support for the showday comes from MintMobile. Sometimes we do things just because that's the way 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.

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