When the classroom enters the pipeline
With the Berklee Music Library and its partnership with APM Music, music created within Berklee can now begin moving through a professional licensing chain while its creators are still students. The initiative brings A&R, publishing, metadata and catalog management closer to the point of creation, turning part of the sync pipeline itself into a learning environment.
Klem Loden
10/1/20265 min read
A track can begin its life in a Berklee classroom without belonging to a film, a series, a game or any other specific audiovisual project. No image is waiting for it, no editor has placed it beneath a scene and no music supervisor has necessarily searched for it. Yet before that image exists, an entire structure can already begin assembling around the music: A&R can participate in its development, publishing and catalog management can prepare it for the professional marketplace, metadata can organize the information surrounding it, and a production music catalog can provide the route through which someone may eventually find it.
This is the space Berklee’s Syncubator has begun to build. Supported by the Berklee Career Center, the industry-driven program gave rise to the Berklee Music Library, a production music catalog launched in partnership with APM Music and featuring tracks created by students at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Through APM, that catalog is available to license worldwide for film, television, advertising, sports, gaming and other visual media.
Berklee students could already encounter sync through music supervision, synchronization licensing, publishing, clearance and sync-focused songwriting. What changes here is the distance between learning about those mechanisms and watching music begin to move through them. The pipeline is no longer waiting entirely outside the classroom.
Learning sync from inside the chain
The Syncubator grew from Berklee’s Student Sync Club, where students interested in music supervision and sync licensing had already begun gathering around this part of the industry. Under Dr. LaMarcus Miller, the initiative developed into a structured program spanning its creative and business sides, with a question at its center: what if students could participate in the sync industry while they were still learning how it works?
Once that question is applied to the music itself, the classroom begins to look different. Songwriters, performers and producers remain at the point where the work is created, but they are joined by students working in A&R, publishing, marketing and catalog management. Senior student Emma Giron serves as the Syncubator’s metadata and catalog manager, handling the considerable amount of information involved in helping publish the team’s music.
The track consequently begins to acquire another dimension before it has ever reached an image. It remains a musical work, but around it appears the information and organization required for that work to circulate. Musical quality may give someone a reason to want the track; it does not, by itself, allow a professional licensing environment to know what the track is, where it belongs, what information accompanies it or how it can be found.
At the other end of that movement sits APM Music. A joint venture between Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group, APM represents more than 300 global libraries and a catalog exceeding one million tracks. The distance between a piece of student music and the professional audiovisual market therefore changes considerably once the Berklee Music Library enters that infrastructure. The track has not been written to an existing picture, but it has acquired a route through which an encounter with one can become possible.
When demand begins moving upstream
The first two Berklee Music Library releases, Modern American Voices and A Berklee Christmas, contain contemporary arrangements of familiar public-domain music including Yankee Doodle and Deck the Halls. The next stage of the catalog reveals another part of the mechanism, because Berklee says future releases will respond to areas of demand identified across visual media.
A pop/R&B album led by alumnus Jevon Garrett is currently in development, bringing together vocalists, songwriters, producers and other collaborators, with Berklee songwriting faculty members Keli Nicole Price and Antea Birchett serving on its A&R team. The Syncubator team is also developing music for potential use around the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics, including cinematic underscore for athlete profiles and high-energy vocal tracks for promotional uses.
Here, the destination begins to exert an influence before the music has completed its journey toward the market. Characteristics of a possible audiovisual use are already visible far enough upstream to inform development and creation, allowing the needs of the other end of the pipeline to travel backward through it.
The movement is subtle, but structurally important. Once patterns of audiovisual demand become legible, they can begin informing A&R decisions and creative development before the music itself exists. The catalog is no longer simply receiving finished tracks and carrying them outward; information coming from the market can also travel in the opposite direction and help shape what enters it.
Miller describes this through the idea of creating music that has a job to do. Where might the track live? Who might use it? Does it work for picture? Can an editor work with its structure? Can a music supervisor find it? Those questions do not arrive after creation as paperwork attached to a finished recording. They begin sharing the room with the creative process itself.
The catalog becomes part of the classroom
This may be where the Berklee Music Library becomes more interesting than the music it contains. Music supervision and synchronization licensing can be taught, rights and clearance can be studied, and students can learn how music is selected and licensed for audiovisual media. A production music catalog introduces something those mechanisms alone cannot provide: movement.
The work can leave the purely hypothetical environment of an exercise and begin accumulating the elements required to circulate. Someone creating the track encounters its musical construction; someone handling metadata encounters the information that must remain organized around it; A&R encounters material to identify, curate and develop; publishing approaches another part of its journey; much farther along the chain, an audiovisual professional may one day encounter the same piece as a possible answer to a particular need.
Each person is looking at the same music, but the object changes slightly as it passes from one pair of hands to another. What begins as a creative work gradually acquires the information, positioning and catalog structure through which it can exist professionally beyond the room where it was made.
That part of sync usually disappears behind its most visible moment. A piece of music appears in a series, advertisement, game or trailer and the encounter seems to have occurred between the track and the image, while everything that allowed one to reach the other retreats behind the result. Here, students can encounter part of that invisible distance before any synchronization has taken place.
Moving the door between education and industry
Berklee presents the Syncubator as an opportunity for participants to build professional credits, reach industry decision-makers and potentially earn income from their work. The program places those possibilities inside an environment where the creative and business sides of sync can begin operating around the same music.
The conventional boundary between learning how a professional chain works and entering that chain becomes less distinct when a piece of music can move through creation, A&R, publishing, metadata and catalog management before reaching a licensing environment connected to APM Music.
The school does not need to reproduce the entire industry for that boundary to move. It is enough for part of the infrastructure to enter the educational environment while the music begins traveling in the opposite direction.
By the time a track reaches the Berklee Music Library, the creative work is therefore no longer standing alone. Around it may already sit A&R decisions, publishing work, organized metadata and catalog management, while APM provides the professional licensing environment through which the catalog becomes available worldwide. The image remains somewhere beyond the horizon and may never arrive; yet long before any eventual synchronization takes place, part of the infrastructure capable of bringing music and picture together is already at work.
Verified Sources and References
Berklee College of Music. “Berklee and APM Music Launch Global Catalog Bringing Student-Created Music to Film, TV, and Beyond.” October 1, 2026.
Berklee College of Music. “Music Supervision and Synchronization Licensing.” MB-423.
Berklee College of Music. “Music Supervision: Selecting and Licensing Music for Media.” SW-273.
Berklee College of Music. “Bachelor of Music in Songwriting.” Songwriting/Sync Track.
Berklee College of Music. “Publishing and Music Supervision.” MB-559.
APM Music. “About APM Music.”
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