When sync becomes export infrastructure
Italy has launched its first Sync Mission in Los Angeles just as other European markets are placing synchronization deeper inside their export strategies. Behind the meetings with music supervisors lies a larger industrial question. What has to be built around a national repertoire before its international availability can become international licensing value?
Klem Loden
10/6/20267 min read
Italy entered the Los Angeles sync market this week with something rather larger than a collection of tracks. FIMI, supported by the Italian Trade Agency, brought sync managers from Italian record companies into three days of meetings across television, film, advertising, trailers and gaming, with the stated purpose of establishing Italian repertoire inside new international licensing networks. The mission is a first for FIMI, but the model itself is not new.
The United Kingdom has been running its own LA Sync Mission for two decades. What began as a trade initiative is now sufficiently embedded in British export policy for the UK government to name sync explicitly in its 2026 music plan, alongside an increase of almost 50% in investment for music trade missions. Its stated ambition goes beyond exposure. Government and industry want to increase both the volume and the value of sync deals involving British artists and labels. Some of the music heard during earlier editions eventually travelled considerably farther than the meeting room. BPI records subsequent placements in Dune Part Two, Star Wars The Acolyte, Alien Romulus and Beverly Hills Cop Axel F, giving the twenty-year program something more tangible than the number of introductions made along the way.
The European picture is now filling in around it. Dutch Music Export is preparing a sync mission to Montréal with curated meetings, market preparation and follow-up built into the program. France’s Centre national de la musique has brought international music supervisors into France for targeted meetings and sent a French sync delegation to SoundTrack Cologne. At European level, EMEE has gone further still, treating sync as an export-capacity problem and studying Los Angeles specifically to determine what European music export organizations can build around it.
Placed beside those initiatives, FIMI’s three days in Los Angeles begin to look less like an isolated networking exercise and more like Italy entering an infrastructure that other export markets have already begun to construct.
Exporting a recording is not the same as exporting its licensing capacity
Italy does not have a problem getting recorded music across a border. FIMI reports that royalties generated by Italian music abroad exceeded €32 million in 2025, up 13.9% in a year and 180% since 2020. Digital accounted for 88% of those export royalties. At home, meanwhile, the recorded music market reached €513.4 million.
The sync figures complicate that picture. Italy’s domestic synchronization segment stood at €12.2 million in 2025 and fell by 5.7%, which FIMI attributes to a decline in Italian film production and consequently in soundtrack use. FIMI is now describing synchronization as a strategic lever for Italian music export while trying to establish its repertoire inside foreign licensing networks.
Those two movements expose a distinction that matters beyond Italy. Digital distribution can make a recording internationally available without making the catalog behind it equally usable by an international audiovisual buyer. A track can already be heard in Los Angeles while the operational conditions required to license it remain fragmented somewhere else.
EMEE’s 2024 study of the Los Angeles sync industry describes exactly where that separation can occur. Across parts of the European market, creatively viable music may arrive with rights holders difficult to determine, splits unresolved, agreements undocumented, metadata missing or catalogs insufficiently organized. In a sync transaction, those are not administrative imperfections sitting behind the creative asset. They determine whether that asset can move when a production needs it.
This changes what “music export” means once sync enters the picture. The object being exported is no longer merely repertoire. It is repertoire plus the capacity to identify it, represent it, clear it, deliver it and respond within the conditions imposed by another industry.
The export office cannot become the sync agent
That creates an unusual structural problem for the institutions now entering this space.
A music export organization can build access to Los Angeles, bring supervisors into its domestic market, finance professional travel, commission market intelligence and help companies become sync-ready. What it generally cannot do is simply behave like a publisher or sync agency and pitch whichever tracks it prefers.
The difficulty appears as soon as collective access reaches the catalog itself. An export organization can open the door, but once it starts deciding which repertoire should be carried through it, the line separating market development from commercial selection begins to move. EMEE’s answer is consequently found before that point. The organization can prepare the companies approaching the door, connect them with the people waiting beyond it and absorb part of what it costs to reach the market, while leaving publishers, labels, sync agents and buyers to make the choices that belong to the transaction itself.
That distinction makes the architecture emerging around European sync export rather more interesting than the missions themselves. Public and trade institutions are not replacing the label, publisher, sync agent or music supervisor. They are beginning to build some of the conditions within which those private actors can transact internationally.
The UK offers the mature version of that arrangement. For twenty years, its Los Angeles mission has provided a route into U.S. studios for British labels, composers and publishers. The Department for Business and Trade sits inside that route alongside the BPI and MPA, bringing government export support together with the recorded-music and publishing sides of the business. The government now places that work inside a wider policy for British music exports and explicitly links sync to commercial growth.
Italy’s first mission arrives much later, but it enters a path whose function is becoming easier to see.
Sync-readiness becomes an export condition
The most consequential part of this model may occur before anybody meets a music supervisor.
EMEE argues that professional sync leaves little room for unreliable clearance and identifies sync-readiness as a central area in which export organizations can intervene. Its proposed work includes training catalogs, improving rights and metadata preparedness, connecting domestic professionals with specialist knowledge and funding the development of international relationships. The organization also notes that maintaining a presence in Los Angeles is prohibitively expensive for many independent European companies, which gives collective infrastructure another function. It distributes part of the cost of market access.
A catalog sent abroad can therefore travel perfectly well and still arrive unprepared for the transaction it was sent there to find. The weakness may remain invisible until somebody actually wants the music. Then the questions begin arriving. Who controls the master, where does the publishing approval sit, are the splits settled, does the metadata lead to the right person, and can that person answer while the production still has time to wait? A recording that was available everywhere a moment earlier can suddenly become remarkably difficult to move.
That obstruction may be encountered in Los Angeles without having originated there. The supervisor has found the music and the foreign market has supplied the demand, yet the license can still begin to stall somewhere back along the rights chain. What looked from the outside like successful international reach has therefore carried the recording farther than the machinery required to transact it.
This places part of international sync performance upstream of the foreign market itself. The stronger the operational layer surrounding the repertoire before it leaves, the less work remains between creative interest and a transaction that can actually proceed.
From cultural export to licensing infrastructure
FIMI’s mission therefore matters less for the names on this week’s itinerary than for the category into which sync is being placed.
The Italian delegation is moving through television, film, advertising, trailers and gaming, and FIMI had already connected participating companies with an Apple music supervisor around a specific sync opportunity before the Los Angeles program began. We do not yet know what will emerge from those encounters, and at this stage the placements themselves are almost beside the point. Something has already happened farther back in the chain. An Italian trade body and the country’s trade agency have decided that entry into those licensing networks should no longer depend entirely upon each company finding the door for itself.
Britain has spent twenty years building one version of that route. European export organizations have been studying how to build others. France is moving supervisors and sync professionals across borders, the Netherlands is preparing companies before sending them into another market, and Italy has now attached its recorded-music trade body and national trade agency to its first dedicated Los Angeles mission.
The pattern does not mean that sync has suddenly become a public function, nor that national institutions can manufacture placements. The transaction remains particular. A particular production needs particular music whose rights can be licensed under particular conditions. What is changing is the layer around that transaction.
Once institutions begin investing in market intelligence, professional readiness, buyer access, international networks and the operational quality of the repertoire entering those networks, they are no longer merely promoting music abroad. They are helping build the conditions under which music can return from abroad as licensing value.
For The Sync Pipeline, that is the more consequential movement behind FIMI’s first trip to Los Angeles. The Italian catalog was already capable of crossing the Atlantic. Italy has begun working on the infrastructure that might allow more value to find its way back.
Verified Sources and References
FIMI. “In 2025, the Italian recorded music market grew by 10.7%.” March 18, 2026.
FIMI. “Report FIMI 2026.”
UK Government. “Turn It Up. Our plan for music.” 2026.
BPI, Music Publishers Association and UK Department for Business and Trade. “LA Sync Mission.”
European Music Exporters Exchange. “Los Angeles Sync Industry Study.” 2024.
Dutch Music Export. “Open Call. Sync Mission Montréal.” 2026.
Centre national de la musique. “France. Rencontre avec des superviseurs musicaux internationaux dans le cadre du Festival Sœurs Jumelles.” 2026.
Centre national de la musique. “Allemagne. Forte présence française à SoundTrack Cologne 2026.” 2026.
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