A single TV placement can send a decades-old song to the top of streaming charts overnight. Golnar Khosrowshahi, founder and CEO of Reservoir Media, explains how sync licensing actually works — and why it’s one of the most powerful and unpredictable forces in the catalog market — in her appearance on Billboard’s On the Record.
1. Sync is the most powerful discovery engine in the industry
When a song lands in the right scene of the right show at the right moment, it can introduce that music to an entirely new generation of listeners who had never heard it before. Grey’s Anatomy pioneered this in the mid-2000s, becoming not just a hit drama but a genuine music discovery platform — to the point where landing a placement on the show became an explicit goal for songwriters. Euphoria carried that torch into the streaming era, pairing emotionally charged scenes with carefully curated music that sparked streaming spikes and cultural conversations.
“Grey’s Anatomy really started this trend of not only being a show everyone was glued to, but being a place where people were discovering music.”
2. The streaming uplift is real but varies enormously
Not every placement creates the same effect. A song featured in a pivotal season finale of a culturally dominant show will generate a very different response than background music in a mid-season episode. Khosrowshahi points to Sinead O’Connor’s “Drink Before the War” — a Reservoir catalog asset — which was featured in a key scene of Euphoria Season 2 and drove meaningful renewed interest in O’Connor’s catalog. Shows that have built a reputation for sophisticated musical taste, where audiences actively seek out the soundtrack, consistently deliver stronger and more durable uplifts.
“Euphoria has captured this persona of having sophisticated musical taste and being very deliberate about the music — and people are still seeking gatekeepers like that.”
3. Biopics are the ultimate sync play for catalog owners
A well-made biopic does what no single TV placement can: it immerses an audience in an artist’s entire story and catalog for two hours, then sends them to streaming platforms to explore further. The Johnny Cash biopic was a landmark moment for catalog revival. More recently, the Bob Dylan biopic — with Timothée Chalamet in the lead — represents the same opportunity at enormous scale. Khosrowshahi sees the surge in music biopics as partly driven by catalog owners who now have both the financial resources and the incentive to fund or facilitate these projects.
“More liquidity and bigger budgets enable either rights holders or filmmakers adjacent to music companies to underwrite these projects — that’s why you’re seeing more of them.”
4. Some music simply cannot be synced — and that has a cost
Sync licensing requires clean rights and content that advertisers and studios are willing to associate their brand or project with. Music with heavy use of expletives, uncleared samples with multiple credited writers, or complicated rights chains is effectively locked out of much of the sync market. For catalog buyers evaluating a potential acquisition, the sync ceiling is a material part of the valuation. A catalog that has historically said no to licensing — or that simply can’t be cleared — is worth materially less than one that is open and accessible.
“You could have music that has historically just said no to licensing — that creates a whole bunch of opportunity. Or music with uncleared samples that can’t easily be licensed at all.”
5. You can’t engineer a sync moment — but you can position for one
The most valuable sync placements are the ones that emerge organically from a music supervisor genuinely falling in love with a song for a specific scene. They cannot be bought or manufactured. What catalog owners can control is making sure their music is in front of as many supervisors as possible, that the rights are clean and quick to clear, and that the catalog is actively maintained and promoted. The placement itself is unpredictable; the preparation for it is not.
“Our sync team is very aware of what the trends are and what the licensing future looks like — is this something we think we can do better marketing to the music supervisors in our database?”
Based on Golnar Khosrowshahi’s appearance on On the Record, Billboard’s music industry podcast.
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