An article in the Harvard Crimson pointed to a project run by Berklee and the movie studio Paramount. The studio has undertaken a massive programme to tag a database of old soundtracks from the 20s onwards, with the goal of making them available for licensing. There are mountains of music out there that cannot practically be used, as they cannot be searched. By tagging old soundtracks, supervisors will be able to locate and cue music from a very rich library that includes scores from films such as Star Trek, Forrest Gump, Chinatown, Mission Impossible, Love Story, and Airplane from composers such as Elmer Berstein, Danny Elfman, Philip Glass, Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone and others.

The idea is certainly good from a logical point of view, and one I recently put to a popular TV series. Why let good music lie dormant when it could be earning money? But a question that bothers me is who will be earning? Was not lots of this music composed “for hire”?

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Berklee students open doors to Paramount’s archives – Boston Movie News | Examiner.com and The Crimson.