The Glossary: Siân Rogers | Company Director & Music Supervisor, SIREN

Next up in this Glossary series exploring the roles that exist with music supervision and adjacent industries, it's another of our speakers from Doors Open UNLOCKED: Artists with Leland, Siân Rogers - Company Director & Music Supervisor at SIREN.

What is your role in music and what does your day to day look like?
Hi! I’m the Company Director and music supervisor at SIREN.

The day to day is quite varied depending on what projects we have on, we tend to work across Advertising, Immersive and Film, but can range from taking briefs and catching up with the Producers / Directors / Agencies / Brands about their music needs, executing creative music searches, working with composers, artists & producers across all genres, budget planning & scheduling, catching up with my team, working with rights holders when working with commercial music to get quotes and put licenses in place, creating cue sheets, producing live recording sessions. A whole mix!  

How did you get into your line of work?
By happy chance. I’ve always loved music, I am a singer and play instruments, but wasn’t sure what my next move was going to be once I left university. One of my friends I used to sing with had done a marketing internship at a label and absolutely hated it but thought it might be what I was looking for so I found an internship which was marketing & sync. I absolutely loved the sync side and never looked back.  

What skills are important in your job?
Soft skills are huge – our relationships with other people whether it’s a producer, director, composer, artist or rights holder are key to everything we do.

A knowledge of DAWs (software to record, edit, mix & master) is really useful so you can play back track ideas to the visuals and provide guide mixes. Everything can change with the visuals. 
There is a real mix of creative as well as administration so you need to have a love and knowledge of a whole range of music as well as the attention to detail to deal with contracts and licensing.

If someone is excited to do what you do, what advice would you give them?

• Try to get some experience either through shadowing or work experience programmes.
• Make sure you’re actively listening to a broad range of music and not just a slave to the algorithms.
• Start building your network – people you meet at an internship, industry events, gigs. It’s a really small industry and you never know who you’ll come across again. You never know where an unexpected conversation might lead. 

What are your top 3 tips for someone who wants work in the music industry in general?

• Do your research about what roles are out there and where you want to work.
• Get real experience to find out what role you’re best suited to - be realistic about your skill set. There may be roles out there that you don’t even know exist.
• Put yourself out there – send that email, go to events – you never know who you might meet. 

Read our in-depth account of learnings from the day here.

Explore jobs in electronic music on Doors Open here.