The Music Soups takes music supervision global

There are few industries where the clock ticks quite as loudly as advertising. Deadlines get tighter, the number of deliverables keeps growing, and the music still needs to be right. It’s a big part of why Sydney-based music supervisor Emily Norton and London-based Kaitlyn Pearce founded The Music Soups: a music supervision company built around combining deep industry experience and global connections with the speed, flexibility and transparency that modern advertising demands.

In just two years, The Music Soups has worked across a diverse range of projects spanning feature film, television and major advertising campaigns, building a client base that includes agencies, brands and production companies. Standout work includes the feature documentary Dance For Your Life, the US Netflix version of Love on the Spectrum, and campaigns for Cadbury and McDonald’s.

The business may be new, but the experience behind it certainly isn’t. Between them, Norton and Pearce bring more than 25 years of experience across music supervision, licensing, publishing and rights management, with backgrounds spanning Universal, Sony, BMG, APRA AMCOS, Peermusic and Audio Network.

As a female-owned and led business, The Music Soups is also part of a growing shift towards greater diversity in an industry that has traditionally been dominated by established structures and networks. For Norton and Pearce, however, building a women-led company was less about making a statement and more about creating the kind of business they wanted to work with themselves: collaborative, responsive and built around strong relationships. Their combined experience has given them a broad network across labels, publishers, artists, managers and rights holders, alongside an understanding of both the creative and commercial sides of music.

“We wanted to build something that felt genuinely modern and bring a fresh perspective to music supervision,” Pearce said. “We’ve both spent a long time in the music industry and built relationships across labels, publishers, artists, managers and rights holders around the world. The opportunity was to bring that experience together in a business that could move quickly and be responsive to what clients need.”

For agencies and production companies, that responsiveness matters. As outputs increase and timelines shrink, music can easily become one of the more complicated parts of a production, particularly when a track needs to be sourced, cleared and delivered across multiple markets. The Music Soups operates across two time zones rather than a traditional nine-to-five model, giving clients access to the team in both Australia and the UK.

For a creative team working towards a locked edit, production deadline or campaign launch, that extra flexibility can make a significant difference.

Speed, however, is only part of the equation. The Music Soups puts equal emphasis on communication and transparency, giving clients realistic expectations around costs, rights and timings from the outset. The aim is to make the process feel straightforward: helping agencies understand what is achievable before they are too far down the production path, while identifying potential rights issues early and exploring alternatives where necessary.

That approach has also helped The Music Soups develop a genuinely international scope in its first two years. The team has worked on briefs calling for music from markets as varied as Iceland, Sri Lanka, Japan, the US, Sweden and the UK.

“Sometimes the brief takes us somewhere completely unexpected, and that’s one of the things we love,” Norton said. “It’s not just about finding a track that fits a description. It’s about understanding the creative and working out how to make it possible from a rights perspective.”

That distinction is important. For a creative team, music supervision isn’t simply about finding a great song. It’s about understanding the idea, the audience and the role music needs to play in bringing a piece of work to life, then navigating the practicalities of rights, budgets, territories and timelines to make it happen.

The Music Soups provides a full range of music services across advertising, film and television, from commercial music clearance and licensing through to music sourcing, composition, re-records, artist partnerships and music supervision. Whether a project needs a track cleared, an original piece composed, a song re-recorded or someone to manage the music process from brief through to delivery, the team can take it from start to finish.

Two years in, it is this combination of experience, global access, speed and clear communication that sits at the heart of The Music Soups’ approach and has helped the business earn the trust of clients working on high-profile campaigns.

“We’ve been really fortunate with the clients we’ve worked with,” Pearce said. “They’ve trusted us with some big projects and come back to us because they’ve been happy with both the work and the way we’ve worked with them. That’s incredibly important to us.”

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