Library Music

I was exposed to library music once I started frequenting www.whosampled.com and started noticing a lot of DeWolfe music was sampled. I immediately started buying up all the DeWolfe albums I could find. I mostly agree with the article here. There is some pretty amazing gems out there, but most people will not be all that impressed with your "elevator muzak". I havent checked into it as Ive not done any commercial release music in a long time, but I believe the sample clearance is much easier/cheaper with this sort of thing as that is the point of it in the first place. Also of note DeWolfe is still alive and well and has tons of material to review online. https://www.dewolfemusic.com/

The second most surprising aspect of this is that there is such a thing as the Red Bull Music Academy, and the most surprising is that it has been around as such for 21 years!

I know they have been involved in "extreme" sports of various stripes for a long time, but I wasn't aware of any programs of theirs outside of that realm.

Not exactly library music, but I've found commercial music from "Extreme Production Music" to be very interesting. I love their Dark Country series. I guess the story is they hired Blues Saraceno to make commercial music, and his rock-inspired country tunes took off, they started releasing albums of it. Outlaw blues, Garage Blues series, Swamp Rock,etc, albums created for commercial sales, but they found record sales profitable, glad too.

Spotify has a Label: search, you can search entire label catalogs, and that lead me to get some really nice albums that are made for genres.

One of my favourite mixes is DJ Mitsu the Beats' 'Library Mix' which is all library music. Seems not available digitally, but very much recommended: https://www.rushhour.nl/record/cd/library-mix-dj-mitsu-beats

Promo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLFyIdNvEb0

While not as cool as 60s experimental stuff, library music still exists in the modern world too as subscription services for content production companies. It can be fun to browse in it's own way.

This particular track I've heard all over the place: https://www.audionetwork.com/browse/m/track/last-dance_64740

Soulwax did a one hour mix consisting of library music called "Librarian Girl" for their "Radio Soulwax" project a small decade ago. Definitely worth checking out: https://vimeo.com/25861658

Luke Vibert’s Nuggets compilations have some excellent examples of this.