"I wish that someone had taught me how the business side of the film and TV music industry works."
Welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview with the incredibly talented composer, Craig Dobbin.
With over 30 years of professional experience composing music for film, television, and commercials, Craig has become a household name in the entertainment industry.
His compositions have touched millions of hearts, and his diverse portfolio ranges from the primetime CBS series NCIS Los Angeles to the world-renowned Discovery Channel Shark Week.
As a co-founder of the contemporary jazz group 3RD FORCE, Craig has also experienced immense success in the music world.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Craig Dobbin: My name is Craig Dobbin and my company is Craig Dobbin Studios.
I’m a composer with more than 30 years of professional musical composition in film, television and commercials. Since 2016, I’ve been composing the score for the top-rated primetime weekly CBS series NCIS Los Angeles.
My love for music began at the age of 7, while studying the piano. By age 14, I was mastering Contemporary Jazz Theory and Classical Composition. While still an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, I composed the music for two films and a variety of television commercials.
Before being named Outstanding Senior and graduating with a B.M. in Composition in 1990, I had also recorded his first solo album for D&D records.
Since then, I have had the privilege of composing music for a wide variety of genres, from the popular PBS show, Jay Jay the Jet Plane and Betsy’s Kindergarten Adventures to the world-renowned Discovery Channel Shark Week, which I have been scoring since 1991.
With such a wide range and depth, my compositions have also been featured in commercials for major clients such as Samsung, Visa, McDonald’s, Mobile Strike, Netflix, Marvel, Exxon, State Farm, among many more.
Recently, I also created music for the feature-length public television documentaries Searching for Home: Coming Back from War and unMASKing HOPE.
In 1993, I formed the contemporary jazz group 3RD FORCE with William Aura and Alain Eskinasi. Our first CD on Higher Octave went to #9 at Radio, our second and third, Force of Nature and Vital Force, both shot to #3, and our fourth CD, Force Field, hit #2.
Our 8th Album, Global Force, released in 2016 after a 10-year hiatus, hit the coveted #1 Billboard spot.
With NCIS Los Angeles coming to an end in May, I am looking forward to expanding my business with more diverse projects and continuing to deliver top quality soundtracks and compositions to my entertainment and corporate clients.
In the past year, what is the greatest business achievement you’d like to celebrate with your team? Please share the details of that success.
Craig Dobbin: Creativity as a product is an interesting concept because you reach a limit to what you can accomplish as an individual. So how do I continue to grow my business and provide what my clients need on time and with consistent quality.
To that end, my greatest achievement over this last year has been to find two people, Levi and Sam, that expand what’s possible for me to do in music and still provide the same level of quality that my clients count on in my music.
Levi is just an amazing composer. He’s helped me tremendously by co-composing two episodes of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week that I supervised. This is a client I’ve had for 30+ years, so I needed to make sure the client was ridiculously happy. And they were!
Many times, young people expect to start where you are. Sam is my assistant. He’s a college kid: young, green and hungry. He understands that he needs to pay dues and grow. He always shows up to work with an amazing attitude and is willing to do anything that is needed!
The music composition business can be very monotonous and boring, given that 90 percent is math, scheduling, hitting deadlines and working an idea until it becomes ‘something.’ Initially, Sam was doing basic tech admin projects that I didn’t want to do or have the time for.
Then, after our first season working on NCIS-LA together, Sam came to me with a list of courses and asked which course he should take that would add to our combined skillset and help optimize what we were doing. That demonstrated amazing drive and initiative!
After that, I took him over to the creative side and started him with mixing projects. He’s contributed immensely to the sound of my mixes and allowed my output to grow far beyond what my capacity was. And Sam’s willingness to grow and develop with me has been invaluable.
What advice do you wish you received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Craig Dobbin: I wish that someone had taught me how the business side of the film and TV music industry works. In this business, there are two main revenue streams: A creative fee paid up front, and the back-end income you receive from airings and royalties.
Composers do not have a union, so the onus is on us to make sure that we’re getting the royalties we are entitled to.
When I was in school no one ever talked to me about royalties and how that system works. My first main client out of school was The Discovery Channel. Soon after I started composing for them, a friend of mine asked me what my royalties were like. I had no idea what he was talking about.
ASCAP and BMI are the two largest royalty collection agencies in U.S. My friend taught me how to affiliate with one and collect royalties. Now royalties are more than half of my revenue stream.
The world is becoming increasingly complex, so it’s critical to know how that system works: who is collecting your royalties, and how are you collecting all of them. I have one agency that scours the European market to make sure I’m collecting everything I’m owed.
Here is a two fold question: What is the book that influenced you the most and how? Please share some life lessons you learned. Now what book have you gifted the most and why?
Craig Dobbin: “Strengths Finder 2.0″ by Tom Rath – a companion to the CliftonStrengths assessment. The book and assessment are based on Gallup’s decades of research into the connection between talent and high performance.
I learned something really valuable: There’s a much greater return if you invest in your strengths, not your weaknesses. Trying to fix weaknesses has an incremental return – but strengths continue to develop infinitely.
From reading that, I would encourage businesspeople to spend time developing your strengths. And, if you can work with people who have complementary strengths, you will continue to magnify your impact.
And funnily enough, the book I have gifted the most is “America’s Test Kitchen 100 Recipes: The Absolute Best Ways to Make the True Essentials.”
When your creativity becomes your profession, I think it is important to find some creative outlet that is not tied to your income and for me, that has become cooking. A friend gave me this cookbook and there is not a bad recipe in the entire book, so I try to pay it forward!
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Craig Dobbin: Our industry is changing fast from broadcast and cable networks to streaming services. There is such a variety of mediums and composers don’t have a revenue model for most of them.
I know a reckoning is coming with the streaming services. The primary streaming medium has to catch up with broadcast models as those go out of existence. With that comes a lot of confusion and change in how our business will be impacted—and we have to protect ourselves.
So, I’d say the biggest challenge is the fighting and competition among composers. As composers, we don’t generally work together.
You can view other composers as a business threat and protect your domain, but then you sacrifice the ability to have colleagues who can go on this journey with you and whom you can share resources with. My view has always been that there’s enough work for all of us.
We need to keep colleagues and friends close to grow with them and not make them enemies and competition. Our collective effort will be way more effective in negotiating these new waters and navigating this change together for the greater good of all of us.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Craig Dobbin: When you have a music composition business, you need to understand how to marry your creative talent with business acumen to make the right decisions and determine the most lucrative projects to take on. Learning how to write music is invaluable, but how do you monetize that?
I’m lucky that I have that kind of business mind and have developed an understanding of how the monetization of music works and what my money-making potential is.
For example, you may be faced with a decision to choose one job over another where one has more backend potential from royalties and the other has a much higher creative fee upfront.
Which job do you choose? If you aren’t experienced or informed enough to make the best choice for your business, it’s important to find somebody to help you navigate that.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Craig Dobbin: One of the most challenging aspects of my business is being able to understand what a client—or non-musician—is saying and put it into actual practice.
A magic ‘layman’s translations skill’ would be awesome so that when producers ask me for music, I instantly understand what they mean and am able to deliver it immediately.
There is a quote that says, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” Speaking about music is an incredibly indefinite art, especially to a non-musician. I need to hear what the client is saying to me in their non-musical language and translate that into a composition that expresses that musically.
For example, if a producer tells me they want it “dark and moody,” I know that I will use the lower instruments in a minor key versus higher register instruments. Sometimes it takes a little back and forth, so to have that magical skill would make my job just a little easier.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Craig Dobbin for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Craig Dobbin or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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