Sync in 60: Spotlight — Friday, May 22, 2026
This week in music-for-media: an Oscar winner finds a new home, and Cannes turns up the volume.
🎼 Opening note
Happy Friday from AMM.
The Croisette is buzzing, the Stanley Cup chase has a new soundtrack, and the rights-and-royalties world just fired a warning shot heard from the auction house to the federal government. It was a week about ownership — who holds the catalog, who scores the moment, and who pays to use the music. Grab a coffee; here’s your weekend rundown.
🔥 AMM hot takes
🔥 Blumberg signs to UMPG + 45RPM.
Blumberg signs to UMPG + 45RPM. Universal Music Publishing Group announced Thursday it has signed The Brutalist Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg to a global deal, struck jointly with sync-and-supervision partner 45RPM Music Publishing and landing him in UMPG’s Classics & Screen division. It’s a reunion — 45RPM co-founder Ayla Owen first signed Blumberg years ago at Warner Chappell. A marquee screen-composer capture for the venture. (More in Spotlight.)
🔥 Jelly Roll scores the playoffs.
The NHL and Amazon Music announced Thursday that Jelly Roll will provide the official 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs theme, “Rise Up” — an Amazon Music Original featured in broadcasts, in-arena, and across NHL channels, debuting during Game 1 of the Western Conference Final. A textbook artist-meets-league sync-and-branding play. (More in Featured Campaign.)
🔥 Peanuts music owner goes to court.
Lee Mendelson Film Productions filed four copyright suits Wednesday over alleged unlicensed use of Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts compositions — naming a video-game publisher, an auction house, a belt-maker, and the U.S. Department of the Interior. A pointed reminder that “iconic” doesn’t mean “free.” (More in Behind the Brief.)
🔥 Cannes turns up the volume on composers.
The Marché du Film’s Spot the Composer (7th edition, with SACEM) and a new Composers on the Rise pilot ran through the festival (May 13–24), pairing film composers with directors hunting for scores. Cannes isn’t only a sales market anymore — it’s increasingly a scoring marketplace.
🔥 Two soundtracks, one Boroughs.
Netflix Music dropped John Paesano’s score for the supernatural series “The Boroughs” on May 21, while Legacy Recordings released a companion songs album the same day. The dual-album rollout — score on one label, songs on another — is fast becoming the default streaming-launch playbook (see also: Off Campus last week).
🔥 Djawadi rides again.
Amazon released the soundtrack to Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War on May 20, scored by Ramin Djawadi with Andrew Bernstein and William Marriott — extending one of the most reliable franchise-scoring partnerships in streaming.
👀 AMM worth watching
👀 Sync-forward publishing is the new flex.
Sync-forward publishing is the new flex. Majors are increasingly structuring around screen revenue — dedicated “screen” divisions, sync-and-supervision joint ventures — rather than treating placements as an afterthought. For example, The Blumberg deal landing inside a UMPG division explicitly built around “Classics & Screen,” routed through a dedicated sync-and-supervision partner. Watch which composers get developed inside those lanes.
👀 Theme parks are a scoring frontier.
Theme parks are a real scoring category. Purpose-built, commercially-released themed-entertainment scores are emerging as their own briefs — a growing opportunity for composers and a new catalog class for libraries and publishers to think about. Isle of Berk and the broader Epic Universe rollout, themed-entertainment music is generating real, commercially-released soundtracks.
👀 Catalog re-recordings keep coming.
Reigning Phoenix Music’s The Transformers: The Movie “Reformatted Edition” (re-recorded by Stan Bush, Sebastian Bach and others, out July 24) shows how legacy screen music is being re-cut for fresh masters — a sync-clearance workaround worth watching as classic-catalog prices climb.
👀 Enforcement season for legacy catalogs.
As classic-catalog values climb, expect more aggressive policing of “sound-alike” and unlicensed use — and more catalog re-recordings created to sidestep clearance friction.
🌟 Spotlight feature 🌟
🌟 Daniel Blumberg — composer & artist (newly signed to UMPG / 45RPM)
This week’s biggest screen-composer headline. The London-based Blumberg — former Yuck and Cajun Dance Party frontman turned film composer — won the Academy Award and BAFTA for Best Original Score for Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” in 2025, after an Ivor Novello for Mona Fastvold’s “The World to Come”. His Thursday signing to UMPG and 45RPM (into the Classics & Screen division) reunites him with 45RPM’s Ayla Owen, who first signed him at Warner Chappell. Recent work includes scores for Fastvold’s “The Testament of Ann Lee” and Gianfranco Rosi’s “Below the Clouds”.
What makes Blumberg compelling for AMM readers: he’s a genuine artist-composer hybrid — a Mute Records solo discography, a silverpoint-drawing practice exhibited from Paris to Berlin — who brings an experimental, hands-on recording sensibility to picture. As majors restructure around screen music, signing a composer like Blumberg is a statement about where prestige and sync value intersect.
🌟 Ayla Owen — Managing Director & co-founder, 45RPM Music Publishing
The dealmaker behind the headline. Owen co-founded 45RPM Music Publishing, the venture launched in October 2024 through a strategic partnership between 45RPM and UMPG, and her fingerprints are all over this week’s Blumberg signing — a relationship she originated years earlier at Warner Chappell, where she rose to VP, Sync & Creative Services for Europe by January 2020. Owen represents a specific and increasingly powerful archetype: the sync-and-creative executive who builds a roster around screen relationships, then anchors it to a major’s infrastructure for global reach.
In a year when “Classics & Screen” is becoming a competitive battleground among publishers, Owen is exactly the kind of creative-side architect quietly shaping which composers get developed and where their music lands.
One to know — and to watch as 45RPM’s roster grows.
🥂 Tastemakers
🥂 John Paesano.
Reliable franchise-builder (Marvel’s Daredevil, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Maze Runner) adds Netflix’s “The Boroughs” to a deep résumé, with the score album out this week via Netflix Music.
🥂 Keegan DeWitt.
“The Hearts Beat Loud” and “Friendship” composer’s “Off Campus Season 1” score landed via Milan last week — the score half of the now-standard score-plus-songs streaming combo.
🥂 Eli Keszler.
The percussionist-composer (Pet Shop Days) scored indie Bunnylovr, with the soundtrack out via Deeper Into Movies — a reminder that the experimental-musician-to-screen pipeline keeps widening.
🥂 The Marché du Film “Composers on the Rise” cohort.
Five early-career international composers got one-on-ones with directors, a masterclass, and Roland tooling support at Cannes this year — the festival betting on the next generation of screen scorers.
✍️ The storytellers
✍️ John Powell — composer, How to Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk (Back Lot Music)
Powell has spent nearly two decades building the sonic identity of How to Train Your Dragon — three animated features, last year’s live-action film, and now an entire Universal Epic Universe land in Orlando. The themed-entertainment score, released this week, is a fascinating storytelling problem: music that has to work not as a linear narrative arc but as an environment guests move through at their own pace, looping seamlessly while still feeling emotionally complete. Powell’s Dragon themes are some of the most hummable in modern animation, and translating them into spatial, experiential scoring is a craft most film composers never touch.
Why his approach matters: as immersive entertainment expands, the composers who can make a theme work both on screen and in a physical space become uniquely valuable — and Powell is writing the playbook in real time.
✍️ Ramin Djawadi — composer, Jack Ryan: Ghost War (Amazon)
Few composers have shaped the sound of prestige streaming like Djawadi (Game of Thrones, Westworld, House of the Dragon), and his ongoing stewardship of the Jack Ryan universe — this week’s Ghost War soundtrack arriving May 20 with collaborators Andrew Bernstein and William Marriott — shows the other side of his craft: the propulsive, geopolitical-thriller mode. Djawadi’s storytelling instinct is rhythmic and architectural; he builds tension through pulse and restraint rather than melody alone, letting the score function almost like a second editor cutting between continents.
For a franchise that lives or dies on momentum, his music is the connective tissue. A masterclass in how recurring-franchise scoring keeps a long-running property feeling urgent.
🎬 Featured release
🎬 “How to Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk” — Universal Epic Universe (Back Lot Music, May 21)
A genuinely novel release: the original music composed by John Powell for Universal’s new themed land, based on the DreamWorks Animation franchise he’s scored from the beginning. This isn’t a film soundtrack repackaged — it’s purpose-built experiential scoring, designed to live inside a physical space guests walk through.
For AMM readers, it’s a window into one of the fastest-growing and least-discussed corners of screen music: the theme-park score as a standalone, commercially-released body of work. Listen for how Powell’s established Dragon motifs are reshaped to loop, layer, and reward repeat visits rather than resolve in a single sitting.
🎧 Featured campaign
“Rise Up” — Jelly Roll × NHL × Amazon Music (2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs)
Announced Thursday, the Grammy-winning artist’s new Amazon Music Original is the official theme of the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs — featured in game broadcasts, in-arena integrations, and across NHL social and digital channels, with a music video (Jelly Roll, the Cup, and league highlights) that debuted during Game 1 of the Western Conference Final. A documentary short featuring NHL stars Jack Eichel and Seth Jarvis follows in June.
For AMM readers, it’s a clean case study in modern sports-media music: an artist-meets-league partnership engineered as a multi-platform branding asset, with the track living exclusively on a single streaming service to drive platform value. The deal pairs marquee-artist energy with postseason urgency — exactly the kind of music-as-brand integration leagues are leaning into harder every season.
💼 Behind the brief
💼 The score-plus-songs split is now standard.
Twice this week — The Boroughs (John Paesano’s score on Netflix Music; songs on Legacy Recordings) and the continued Off Campus rollout (Keegan DeWitt’s score on Milan; an Island “mixtape” songs album days earlier) — productions released score and songs as separate albums on separate labels, dropping in the same window.
The logic: score albums serve the film-music audience and awards consideration, while songs albums work as artist-development and playlist plays, often through a label better positioned for pop promotion.
One project, two catalogs, two audiences — and two revenue lines. Expect this to be the default for any streaming title with both an original score and a curated needle-drop identity.
💼 Behind the brief
💼 “Iconic” doesn’t mean “free.”
Lee Mendelson Film Productions — the family-owned company that has stewarded the Peanuts television/film music catalog since the 1960s — filed four copyright suits Wednesday over alleged unlicensed use of Vince Guaraldi’s compositions and arrangements, including “Linus and Lucy,” “Skating,” and Guaraldi’s arrangement of “O Tannenbaum.”
The defendants are an unusually broad set: video-game publisher GameMill Entertainment (over its 2025 Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club, where the suit alleges sound-alike cues too close to the originals), Heritage Auctions and Buckle-Down over promotional social posts, and the U.S. Department of the Interior over a holiday digital card.
The firm is seeking at least $300,000 from GameMill plus injunctions, with counsel framing it as a stand against an “intolerable digital glut” of unlicensed use. The takeaway for anyone touching beloved catalog: a recognizable melody — even a newly recorded “in the style of” version — can still require clearance, and rights holders are getting more litigious in the social-and-streaming era.
✨ Industry moves
✨Daniel Blumberg signs a global publishing deal with UMPG and 45RPM Music Publishing, joining UMPG’s Classics & Screen division (reuniting with 45RPM’s Ayla Owen).
✨The NHL and Amazon Music partner with Jelly Roll on the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs theme “Rise Up.”
✨John Powell’s How to Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk themed-land score released via Back Lot Music. Ramin Djawadi (with Andrew Bernstein, William Marriott) scores Jack Ryan: Ghost War via Amazon.
✨ Varèse Sarabande announces deluxe/expanded reissues including Timecop (Mark Isham) and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (John Debney).
✨ Reigning Phoenix Music + Hasbro set a re-recorded The Transformers: The Movie “Reformatted Edition” for July 24.
✨ John Paesano scores Netflix’s The Boroughs (score album via Netflix Music; songs via Legacy).
✨ The Marché du Film runs Spot the Composer (7th edition, with SACEM) and a new Composers on the Rise pilot at Cannes.
➡️ AMM Weekend recommends:
➡️ Listen: John Powell’s How to Train Your Dragon: Isle of Berk (Back Lot Music) — the theme-park score as its own art form
➡️ For the sports crowd: Cue up Jelly Roll’s “Rise Up” against this round’s playoff highlights — then notice how the league threads it through broadcast, arena, and social.
➡️ Djawadi’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War (Amazon)
➡️ Worth a revisit: A Charlie Brown Christmas and the Guaraldi songbook — this week’s lawsuit is a good prompt to appreciate just how much cultural weight a few jazz piano cues can carry (and why their owners guard them).
➡️ John Paesano’s The Boroughs (Netflix Music)
➡️ Keegan DeWitt’s Off Campus Season 1 score (Milan)
➡️ Revisit: Daniel Blumberg’s Oscar-winning The Brutalist score (Milan) and his Testament of Ann Lee soundtrack — essential listening before his next UMPG/45RPM chapter.
➡️ Follow from afar: Cannes 2026’s music programming through May 24 — the Marché du Film’s composer initiatives and the Cannes Soundtrack Award are where next year’s prestige scores get discovered.
➡️ For the crate-diggers: Varèse Sarabande’s Timecop deluxe (Mark Isham) — a reminder that the catalog-reissue world is having a moment, and that re-recorded and expanded scores are quietly reshaping clearance economics.
Editorial Disclaimer: AMM content is intended for editorial, informational, and educational purposes using publicly available sources, industry announcements, interviews, and reports believed to be reliable at the time of publication. If any information requires correction or updating, please contact us.