The early summer sun glinted off the Atlantic as musician and audio engineer Dorian Love walked his dog along the shore. He relished the tranquility of the softly breaking waves. Suddenly, a disturbance—the squawking of squabbling birds. Love recognized them as oystercatchers, which have a distinct call. His first instinct was one that many audio producers will recognize: to take out his phone and record the sound. 

“I’m always out in the street doing field recordings with my phone,” says Love. He’s amassed a library of found sound that informs and inspires his music, some of which he composes specifically for podcasts.

Freelancers like Love are now regularly tapped by podcasts to compose custom melodies—but it wasn’t always this way. Before podcasts were invented in 2004, audio storytelling was primarily distributed through broadcast radio. The songs used on those shows were covered by the blanket license agreements that stations had with record labels. Often, all a producer had to do to use a commercially released song in an audio story was to fill out a cue sheet and submit it to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which would then ensure musicians were paid for the plays of their songs on air. But when audio storytelling moved from broadcast radio to streaming, creators lost the latitude they once had to feature virtually any song regardless of its copyright restrictions. They’ve had to get creative with commissioned and self-made music ever since. 

Audio artist Brendan Baker witnessed this shift firsthand. He produced and sound designed Love and Radio back when it was broadcast solely on the radio, where he could weave commercially released music into episodes. That approach became essentially impossible when Love and Radio became a digitally distributed podcast. Baker says he’s nostalgic for his old way of approaching podcast scoring, back when he could mine his own memory for songs that he knew would elevate any given moment in a show, “almost like the way that you would quote from poetry or literature.” 

In podcast production meetings today, Baker says, “I bring up this idea of, like, ‘It’d be really great if we could budget for licensing.’ Everyone sort of backs away slowly, because it’s going to be expensive. And it’s going to be complicated.” As copyright-restricted music became largely inaccessible for audio storytellers, it changed what we think of as “podcast music.” “One of the jokes among the sound design community is, ‘OK, now bring in the marimbas.’”

Where did that distinct style of “podcast music” come from? One of the most influential narrative audio programs of the modern era is This American Life. Jonathan Menjivar, who was a producer on that show from 2010 to 2018, learned how to create its signature sound from colleagues Ira Glass, Julie Snyder, Jane Marie, and Robyn Semien. He says they taught him to not “make the things that are super sad feel overwrought by adding [intense] music.” Their philosophy was to use a lighter touch, with music that’s generally spare. 

The creators of some of the most popular podcasts of the 2010s shared a similar approach. “What I noticed in the earlier years was just a tendency toward that kind of warm electronic music,” especially in the vein of Brian Eno and Yo La Tengo, and music that was “repetitive to some degree,” says Julie Shapiro, cofounder of the Third Coast International Audio Festival and executive producer of shows like Ear Hustle. “I’ve always thought less is more if you have the right kind of music and the right kind of moment.”

That style is still heard across a number of shows today, but producers are also experimenting with other kinds of music to make their audio stories come alive. And Menjivar is conscious of not repeating the style of This American Life in his work now. “Anytime I’m using music that sounds a little bit too much like what they would use,” he says about scoring his new podcast, Classy, “I usually skip it.” 

No matter the style of show, Menjivar and Shapiro both emphasize the importance of implementing music in podcasts in a thoughtful way. Menjivar likens it to the construction of a tiled wall, where the story is the tiles and the music is the caulk that keeps it all together. He thinks about where music will go in each episode from the very first drafts of the scripting process. And Shapiro values bringing in music that ties naturally to the essence of any show. Ear Hustle, which she executive produced, is about the daily realities of life in prison and post-incarceration; all of the music on that show was created inside San Quentin State Prison or by formerly incarcerated people. “Whether people realize it or not,” she says, and “whether we say it or not, it’s built into the integrity of the story.”

Creating a podcast’s sonic signature requires that composers work closely with clients to write music that will support the story. As Love says, “you want the music to be showcased a bit, but my priority is the narrative.” The same is true for Jonathan Mitchell, Peabody Award-winning producer and the founder of the fiction podcast The Truth. “My default plan is always to have no music at all,” he says. “And then if I listen to it and it needs music to work, then I’ll put it in. I wait for the material to tell me it needs music.”

For Mitchell, it’s not just that music needs to be in harmony with the dialogue. “When you put a piece of music into a radio piece, what you’re doing is you’re creating a new piece of music,” he says. “It’s a musical art form to begin with. Music is just audio, podcasts are just audio; these things are connected. It’s not just talking, it’s not just about information. It’s about rhythm and momentum and creating an experience for people. Think of it as a musical experience, and that’ll lead you to an interesting place.”

Mitchell’s process of creating music for The Truth involves using stems—individual audio tracks that make up a song—that he finds online. Then he applies synthesizers and plugins to generate any sound he needs. “If you can imagine a sound and there’s a way to get it, I will get it,” he says. 

Though podcast creators have options for making or finding royalty-free music, Baker would still like the ability to use commercially released songs in his projects. “It would require a kind of record-keeping infrastructure that doesn’t currently exist,” he acknowledges. “It would involve cue sheets, and having to keep track of how much money podcasts are making [to establish] royalties… It would also require a lot of buy-in from producers and record labels.” But it could be a way to ensure that musicians are compensated fairly while giving producers access to use the art that inspires them to create. 

This type of system, or something like it, could be something that we see evolve over time. Kerri Hoffman, CEO of PRX, says that “the rise in popularity of podcasts will hopefully force some fixes in what is broken in the music industry, because everybody knows that the musicians are kind of the last paid in the funnel for music rights.”

For now, composers and podcast producers will continue to delight our ears with what they create themselves—and maybe they’ll find new ways to make music from the distant squawking of oystercatchers.