At a recent World Soundtrack Awards industry panel, composer Simon Franglen struck a common chord when talking about his work on “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”
“We had hundreds of musicians in a room, pouring their emotion out in that precise second,” he recalled. “How can that ever be replicated by AI?”
This year’s WSA Film Music Days, held Oct. 8–10 in Ghent, Belgium, took aim at that very question, gathering the industry for three days of talks, roundtables and mixers addressing composers’ most pressing concerns.
Here are four takeaways from an event that proved composers needn’t play solo.
Strength in Numbers
Labor structures are a hurdle. Unlike many other key creatives and department heads, composers in the U.S. and U.K. face legal barriers to unionizing and collective bargaining. The European Composer and Songwriter Alliance helps fill that gap, uniting national associations to lobby policymakers and guide young composers through contracts and negotiations.
Representing more than 30,000 composers and songwriters across 57 member organizations, ECSA had a strong presence in Ghent, hosting a roundtable before receiving this year’s WSA Industry Award.
“There’s still a long way to go and a lot of work to do,” ECSA president Helienne Lindvall said in accepting the award. “But one thing is clear: We have become a voice to be reckoned with, giving composers and songwriters a seat at the table. Because, as someone once said, if you’re not sitting at the table, chances are you’re on the menu.”
Art vs. AI
To counter the growing threat of generative AI, ECSA is also pushing to shape the EU’s evolving AI Act around three core demands: AI companies must get permission before using copyrighted music to train generative models; creators must be fairly compensated for that use; and platforms must disclose which catalogs and datasets they use.
“If we want to protect those at the heart of music creation, we must continue to defend the three fundamental principles of Authorization, Remuneration and Transparency,” Lindvall said. “In other words, our art.”
Platforms like AI music generator Suno make those demands all the more urgent. Lindvall had a blunt warning for musicians and composers curious about the technology. “Read the terms of service,” she implored. “Anything you upload, even if you think, ‘I’ll just upload my music and see if they can come up with a guitar lick,’ you are giving them the right to use your music and exploit it commercially, without limitation, in perpetuity.”
Star Track: The Next Generation
For many panelists, AI’s short-term savings come at the expense of the next generation of composers. As music factories and generative tools take over entry-level work, newcomers risk losing a vital foothold in the industry.
“Hans Zimmer wouldn’t be who he is today without [getting a gig on the 1980s British game show] ‘Going for Gold,’” Franglen said. “We all start somewhere, and we all have our various steps. It’s essential that those steps exist.”
Darrell Alexander, who runs composer agency Cool Music, sees working as an additional composer as the best entry point for anyone starting out. “It’s still better to try to be an additional composer to a master,” he said. “We accept applications for jobs, and I think that’s really important, because you can study and learn and see.”
Adiescar Chase is doing her part, too. After her acclaimed work on Netflix’s “Heartstopper,” she pushed to bring on additional hands for subsequent seasons. “I told production before we started, ‘Just so you know, I’m going to have an assistant this time,’” she said. “They had to trust me. I hope that in my community, the people I bring on to assist know I’m trustworthy.”
Looking ahead, Martin Phipps (“The Crown”) believes that creatives will always prioritize human contact — and that AI won’t eat every job.
“It’s a skill in itself to prompt an AI,” Phipps said. “You need to employ someone to do that, and that somebody’s got to be there, for a while anyway. Though I do know a few directors who would quite like to write the music themselves, which is a worry!”
Take It to the Bank
Beyond AI anxieties, panelists also took to the WSA to share best practices. Sound banks in particular proved well loved.
On Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water,” for instance, Paris Hurley skipped scoring to picture. Instead, Hurley created and collected bespoke sounds, often using her body as an instrument, then rearranged and remixed them to fit each section of the film. “This is a story that’s only told once, with a director who cares deeply about what’s being made, and it would almost be a disservice to just rock up with a collection of familiar sounds,” Hurley says.
“Slow Horses” composer Daniel Pemberton shares the instinct. “Creating your own sonic palette that’s unique to each project makes such a difference to a score,” he says. “So I always try to build fresh palettes. It’s like getting a new instrument each time and working out how it works. There’s a naivety to that, but also a freshness, and the material is fresher because hopefully it’s stuff people haven’t heard before.”
Along with giving a project its own sonic identity, a sound bank can speed up the work, a real advantage on a show with a schedule as unrelenting as “Slow Horses.”
“The ‘Slow Horses’ sound bank took a long, long time to get working,” Pemberton says. “But now I’ve built all these sounds that are very distinctive to the show. It’s like having a synthesizer with presets that no one else has. And you can be very lazy, hold one thing down, and it still sounds cool!”
