For years, the film soundtrack business was a sleepy corner of the industry.
Apart from the occasional
Titanic, most compilation soundtracks seemed irrelevant. But of late, a reawakening has occurred, and Robert Kraft, as president of Fox Music, has been on the front lines. Three of Fox's soundtracks reside in the top 10 of Billboard's Top Soundtracks chart:
Alvin and the Chipmunks at No. 1,
Juno at No. 2 and
Once at No. 7.
An artist himself, with 15-year experience with Fox, Kraft's career has survived the ups and downs of the music industry. But the recent resurgence in his soundtracks has even taken him by surprise. What does he suspect is the secret to soundtrack success? Two words: Singing chipmunks.
Why did the soundtracks of Once, Juno and Alvin take off in a big way?
Six months ago if I had said we'd have three gold records for soundtracks or that
Juno would be a No. 1 soundtrack, everyone would have laughed, considering that soundtracks have been moribund for years. I think
Once is the most obvious, in that it's a musical film, there are songs performed and it won the Oscar for best song.
Juno? Unless there's an enormous Moldy Peaches audience lurking – a scarily huge audience that no one's realised – that one is mind-blowing on every level.
In the case of
Alvin, I can tell you that a year ago I was thinking, "Oh, maybe we'll get a sweet kids' record out of it." Although [the film's producer] Ross Bagdasarian Jr kept saying: "You realise that we've sold 60 million Alvin records worldwide since 1958?" And I'd say, "Well, it's a different market, a different universe."
This is the first time
Alvin has been in the top five since 1958, and only because the soundtrack offers groovy music that people dig.
Is this a lucky streak?
If I was going to do a seminar on film music in 2008, I would say that if you have a compilation soundtrack album, of which there are too many, you run the risk of the audience cherry picking their favourite song. We found that out with
The Devil Wears Prada, a beautiful movie, great music throughout – U2, Madonna – and it turned out that people would go to iTunes and pick out the KT Tunstall song that they liked or the Madonna cover that they liked. I think if there's any kind of meta theory it's to make fresh, original music that's special to the movie and plays well and people will want to go listen to it.
What other film projects do you have in the pipeline?
I get calls from record executives asking me something I haven't been asked for five years: "What do you have coming?" That is a call I used to get, I think, the year after we made
Titanic.
We're already at work on
Jennifer's Body, which is written by Diablo Cody, produced by Jason Reitman, who directed
Juno.
The X-Files movie there's already interest in. It's being scored by Mark Snow, the guy who did all the
X-Files music [for the TV show]. We have a picture coming up called
The Secret Life of Bees. It stars three amazing musical artists as the three actresses: It's Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah and Alicia Keys. That one could be the next big one.
What do you tell directors who come to you with hopes of making a hit film accompanied by a hit soundtrack?
I don't know how many meetings I've had with directors, where they bring up, "And it'll make such a cool soundtrack". And I just say: "It won't happen. Now it's much harder." The great news is that it means that everyone in my shop can be as creative as possible. There's no following the old rules – we see what we can find that's special and hasn't been done a thousand times.
How hard is that?
This is my new hex in life - songs in a television commercial. There are very few songs that I can find anymore that somebody doesn't say: "Oh, isn't that in the Geico commercial?" or "I think KFC is using that Rolling Stones song."
I mean, there's nothing left. In fact, certain songs we put in the movies now, people say: "Is there a TV on in the room [in that scene]?" Instead of [believing that it's on] the radio that's playing. It's terrible.
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