By John Pellegrini
Barter production library packages are all the rage right now in the radio industry. The concept of trading a couple of commercials per day in order to gain extra production beds and audio candy is quite appealing to many stations. Most of the barter packages offer bi-weekly CD updates of music beds, stagers, sweepers, and montages of audio to fit particular formats. Some even go so far as to offer fully produced imaging promos that can either be aired intact or used as idea starters. These are all great supplements to a station’s existing library packages.
Yet the question can occasionally be heard echoing throughout the lonely end of the station hall down where the production person makes his or her nest, “why don’t the production library companies offer their actual music libraries on barter?” The answer: welcome to TA&A. Toby Arnold & Associates have launched a barter program for their entire production and imaging library. Not just a few music beds every 2 weeks; we’re talking the entire catalog of CDs under the TA&A banner. For those of you who think that the best brainstorming tools are all the music tracks you can get, then this is a dream come true. If you’ve been bugging your PDs and GMs about needing more than just one library at your station, or if you’re looking to change what you have, this just might be the answer.
Other barter packages give you startup kits of 4 or 5 CDs, and then an update CD every two weeks. With the TA&A package, you get anything you want from their entire library delivered immediately. Then, there are quarterly update CDs for the newer libraries just like a regular cash contract. This means you could literally start off with 30 or 50 CDs in your barter agreement. The advantage is apparent right away; even if your station already has a production library with someone else, you can add an entirely new one without affecting the production library budget. TA&A have 8 commercial production libraries and over 24 imaging packages for every kind of format including AC, Country, Rock, Newstalk, Sports, CHR, Urban, Gold, and Spanish. Plus, they have all the variations of each category covered such as Alternative, Rocking Country, Hot AC, and the others.
For the review, TA&A kindly supplied some samples of their two newest commercial music libraries, Attitude III, and Lifestyles III, as well as two of their imaging packages, Deep Impact and Rock Impact, and they kick royal patootie. Both Deep and Rock Impact have tons of sweepers, stagers, promo beds, sound effects, and mixouts. You start with enough tracks that you won’t need to worry about imaging sounds for over a year. For Rock stations, whether Classic Rock, Alternative, AAA, or AOR, Rock Impact is exactly what the doctor ordered. Deep Impact is perfect for Hot AC, CHR, Urban, and News or Sports Talk. The new Attitude III and Lifestyle III commercial libraries will blow your ears off. They fit the music formats exactly. Lawrence Mangiameli, TA&A’s Creative Director, definitely has been studying what the industry wants, and he’s put together a full assortment that’s exactly what any production person could use. Each disc contains 60-second beds and two mixouts of each bed. Although you could truly say that some of those mixouts are more like separate tracks in their own right, due to near totally different arrangements instead of being just rhythm tracks off the main bed like some other libraries offer. Just in case you were wondering, yes, other discs have 30-second music beds available.
TA&A has made getting a full production library for your station, either as a secondary library or as a new one, much easier with the barter package. Toby Arnold’s quality and variety are always right up there with the best of the best, and these CDs will definitely be among the ones you grab first when you start searching for that “exactly-right” sound in your production. By the way, don’t fret if you can’t do barter… TA&A is still happy to furnish libraries for standard cash contracts as well.
For all the complete details on the barter package that’s right for your format, call Toby Arnold & Associates at 800-537-5335. They have a great Website at taamusic.com, which can help you get demos and also can tell you exactly which of their imaging and commercial packages are the ones you want for your station’s particular format.
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