13. The Small Line Item in the Budget, The Big Return on the Screen

A finance writer recently published an essay arguing that film composers represent the highest creative IRR in Hollywood ("The Highest Creative IRR in Hollywood", Digital Flashlight, digitalflashlight.substack.com, July 2026). IRR, internal rate of return, is the question investors ask when they want to know what a dollar actually did during all the years it was gone. The argument, built around Ludwig Göransson's career across Black Panther, Oppenheimer and Sinners, was simple: one expense, incurred over a few months, running through the entire life of a property. That is an investment profile. It has simply never been written down as one.

I want to make the same argument from a different seat. Not from the spreadsheet, but from the composer's desk.

Four Tiers, Four Different Understandings

In my experience, how much a production values its music budget has almost everything to do with where that production sits in the industry. There are roughly four tiers, and each has its own particular way of understanding, or misunderstanding, what it is paying for.

The first tier is the new director or producer, still financing every department on instinct and goodwill. For these productions, music is often seen as something that can be solved with stock. A library track, a subscription service, something affordable that fills the silence. This is understandable. When you are stretching a budget across a dozen departments for the first time, music can feel like a problem with a cheap solution. The understanding that it is not comes with time, and usually with the painful experience of watching a scene fall apart because the music underneath it was never written for that story.

The second tier is where the problem becomes more interesting. These are productions with real budgets, real crews, real ambitions. The cinematography is strong. The color grade is considered. The casting is taken seriously. And then, somewhere in the spreadsheet, the music line gets compressed because it is the column that feels most negotiable. What this tier does not yet understand is something neuroscience has been saying for a long time: auditory information reaches the brain faster than visual information. We react to what we hear before we consciously register what we see. A scene with strong performances and wrong music does not become a scene with strong performances. It becomes a broken scene. The music does not sit underneath the image. It restructures how the image is perceived. A hundred thousand pound production with a thousand pound music budget is not a hundred thousand pound production. It is a production that has undermined itself at the level of the audience's nervous system.

The third tier knows this. Experienced directors and producers who have made enough work to see how music functions across a project's entire life arrive at the conversation with a different kind of respect. The budget is still negotiated. It is still, relative to the total spend, surprisingly small. But it is approached with the awareness that the return it generates will outlast every other line on the invoice.

Then there is a fourth tier, and it operates by entirely different rules. Nolan, Villeneuve, Spielberg, Scorsese: directors who have spent entire careers treating their composer not as a post-production hire but as a creative partner of equal standing. The energy and budget these directors allocate to music is not generosity. It is precision. They understand that every craft in filmmaking has its own pyramid, and that the quality of the work at the top of that pyramid is inseparable from the quality of the collaborators brought into it. A score composer working with an exceptional score editor and a world-class orchestra produces something categorically different from one working alone with a deadline. A director working with an exceptional score composer produces a film that sounds, and therefore feels, categorically different from one that does not. This understanding is more deeply embedded in European cinema and in the upper tier of Hollywood than anywhere else in the industry, and it shows.

What the Budget Does Not Buy

Here is the thing that even the most experienced producers sometimes forget to calculate: when a film or series finishes its run, the color grade does not generate ongoing revenue. The production design does not earn royalties. The cinematographer does not receive residuals every time someone streams the film in another country.

The music does.

A well-made score, attached to a well-made project, becomes a soundtrack album. A soundtrack album is a commercial product with its own life, its own audience, its own streaming numbers, its own sync potential, its own award eligibility. It sits on platforms and generates income quietly, long after the theatrical run has closed. Top composers across the industry, including figures like Hans Zimmer, Ludwig Göransson, Lorne Balfe, and Harry Gregson-Williams, build dedicated production and content infrastructures to maximize the reach of their work. The deliberate circulation of their recording sessions, creative workflows, and orchestral sessions on social media is a calculated strategy, and one that succeeds because the core material is inherently engaging.

A hundred musicians in a room recording something that was written specifically for this story, in this style, for these scenes: that is content. That is a behind-the-scenes documentary, a series of social posts, a press interview angle, a Grammy campaign, an awards season narrative. None of this requires a separate budget. It exists because the music was made well and the making was documented.

The Promotional Asset Nobody Is Using

Productions that understand this begin their marketing campaigns not with trailers but with music. Two or three months before release, they put the score into the world. They show the recording sessions. They ask the composer the right questions and film the answers. They treat the music not as a delivery that happens in post-production and then disappears into the mix, but as a story that runs parallel to the film's own story and can be told to audiences who have not yet seen a single frame.

This is not a new idea. It is what the best productions have been doing for years. But it remains surprisingly rare, which means it remains a genuine competitive advantage for any production willing to try it.

There is another dimension to this that producers and directors rarely calculate explicitly. A production is adopted by as many people as are genuinely involved in making it. When a score is recorded with a full orchestra, those hundred musicians do not simply deliver a service and go home. They become part of the project. They share it. They talk about it in their own circles, post about it, recommend it to people who would never have found it otherwise. They become natural ambassadors, not because anyone asked them to, but because the work is theirs too. From a producer or director's perspective, hiring an orchestra is not just a musical decision. It is a community decision. Those are not just the people who will play the notes. They are the people who will carry the project into rooms you cannot reach yourself, and do it with the kind of genuine enthusiasm that no marketing budget can manufacture. Collaboration at scale is always an advantage. The larger and more committed the group of people who feel ownership over a piece of work, the wider and more organic its reach will be.

The diversity of material alone is worth considering. A production can only release so many clips from the film before audiences feel they have already seen it. But the music opens an entirely different dimension of content: the composer's intentions, the musicians involved, the cultural research behind specific cues, the recording process, the instrumentation choices, the moments where a scene and a piece of music found each other. All of it is shareable. None of it spoils the film.

After the Premiere

Awards season makes the case even more clearly. A film that has released a strong, well-documented score enters its awards campaign with a second narrative already running. Music travels differently than film. It gets added to playlists. It plays at events. It earns nominations in categories the film might not otherwise reach. It reminds audiences that the project exists at moments when the marketing budget has moved on to something else.

The productions that understand this treat the composer's work not as a production expense to be minimized but as a long-running asset to be cultivated. They document the making of it. They release it strategically. They let the musicians who performed it become part of the project's public identity.

The ones that do not understand this deliver a beautiful film with a forgotten score, and then wonder why the awards conversation moved past them.

What This Means for You

If you are a composer reading this, the argument is not simply that you deserve to be paid more, though the numbers would support that case. The argument is that understanding the full value of what you make changes how you advocate for it and how you present it to the people who hire you.

If you are a director or producer reading this, the argument is simpler still: the music budget is the smallest line on your spreadsheet and one of the longest-running investments you will make. Document it. Release it. Let it work for you before the film comes out, during the release, and long after the theatrical run has ended.

Ludwig Göransson's third Oscar was won for a film about the power of music to punch a hole in time. The industry watched him accept it and went back to filing him under production expense. That is the gap this essay is about. And closing it starts with deciding, on your next project, that the music is not the last thing to be figured out. It is one of the first.