Pennybank Tunes is a Music Library based in France. Teaming with worldwide distributors, they are achieving a tremendous amount of quality music for images. Following is the interview with one of its founding members, Nicolas Szymanski.
-What were the ideas behind creating your music library?
Pennybank Tunes is a family creation with my mother, Helen Banks, and my brother Olivier Szymanski. We all worked one way or another around music, and we knew many great musicians and creative composers. So, one day we thought we’d like to start a PRODUCTION MUSIC LABEL (Films, TV Series, Documentaries…) to enable our pool of artists to put out the music they authentically wanted to.
-How would you quickly describe your function within PennyBank Tunes?
We went opposite directions from the main stream library market which formats the music for production music. Our mojo was producing acoustic, authentic and hopefully artistic albums. Every composer wants to produce their music and very few have to opportunity to do so. We started with 3 albums, and sent them to music publishers around the world and today we are distributed in more than 40 countries with almost 200 albums. In a small company, you need to do everything, it starts with having ideas for new projects, finding the right composers, recording, editing and protecting the works and then distributing it through digital platforms. So, I have to combine roles of art director, project manager, as well as metadata tagger…
– Does it work differently with publicity than for soundtracks for films and TV…
We produce music for film, series, like Mad Men, which was our first big synchro in a series we love, Homeland, Lucifer, Emily In Paris… Each time it’s a different project.
. 
Producing music for images involves many versions for one title that means if you have a song, you need instrumentals, also 60 sec cuts and 30 sec cuts for commercials. Mostly our clients use the music as we produced it, except for commercials where they want custom music and sometimes changes in that case, we have to recreate a new track, redo the recording and adapt it to the client.
For example that is what we recently did with this wonderful CHANEL BEAUTY clip:
– What was the most fun you experienced?
For the EGO, since our small label started as a home studio, it’s when we won the nomination in London at the P.MA For Best Word Music with « African Safari », and in L.A in 2016 at the PMC Awards for Best Use in a Film with « Life Is Everything » in the Disney Film Violetta, and Best track in the category Dark and Mysterious with « Nostalgic Journey” also in L.A at the Production Music Awards in 2019. But actually what’s really the most rewarding is when you send money to composers for a synch, recording string orchestras in Macedonia by example or recording music from many places in the world has always been a great adventure…
For more info: http://www.pennybanktunes.com
