I came across a website yesterday thanks to Greg Kocis that holds some very interesting and exciting ways for an artist to find music licensing opportunities for TV shows on a national scale.  One of the ways that an artist can find opportunities is by looking for TV shows that use music that is similar to their own style of music.  But how do you find those shows?  You can watch a lot of TV, listen for the music that is similar to yours and hopefully interest the Music Supervisor.  I did a quick check and CBS currently has 32 shows listed. 

In prime time alone.  

Multiply that by the number of channels out there (I'll let you count them up) and there are hundreds and hundreds of shows out there.  Who has time to listen and watch that much TV?  No one, that's who. 

In comes Tunefind.com, a website dedicated to finding music from TV and movies.  I think the main point of it is to help people find that song they just heard on CSI: Miami or whatever.  Cool idea actually.  However, when I saw it, a whole other way of using the website occurred to me.


 
I ran across this insightful interview with Music Supervisor Lindsay Wolfington from the show One Tree Hill.  In it she offers the "other side" perspective of what they go through to get music into a show.  Below were some key parts of the interview that stood out to me, with extra special emphasis added with italics:

A lot of people think it's simple to get music for a television show, but on the real side, what kind of process do you go through to get songs played?
LW: Music supervision includes much more than just picking songs that you like. Here are the essential steps: