When Amanda Krieg Thomas was a teenager growing up in Weston, Connecticut, she — like many of her peers — spent her school nights burning perfectly curated mix CDs. But rather than focusing on favorite genres, artists or specific moods, Krieg Thomas’ CDs had a different theme: music from (and inspired by) her favorite TV shows. “The OC, Roswell, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I loved them all,” she gushes.
Teen-oriented TV was in the midst of a heyday during Krieg Thomas’ young adulthood in the early aughts, as networks like The WB (which later merged with UPN to become The CW) and ABC Family (later rebranded to Freeform) zeroed in on young not-quite-adults and perfected a formula they couldn’t resist — usually involving love triangles, a social outcast landing the cool kid and, as Krieg Thomas astutely noticed, music central to the storyline. Popular shows of the day like those Krieg Thomas loved, plus hits such as Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill, eschewed traditional scores for pop music soundtracking key moments, catapulting songs like The Fray’s “How To Save a Life” and Gavin DeGraw’s “I Don’t Want To Be” to mass audiences in the process.
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Fast forward to 2026 and a lot has changed. Krieg Thomas, 41, is now a successful music supervisor with her own company, Yay Team, where she and her colleagues find and license the perfect songs to score films and TV shows. Streaming video on demand has largely replaced cable, flooding the marketplace with shows and enabling instant, global viewership. Meanwhile, the music industry has shifted to an all-you-can-eat streaming model of its own.
But it’s clear that, once again, TV aimed at adolescent and young adult audiences with an appetite for melodrama is experiencing a renaissance — and this time, it’s breaking the accompanying songs to far bigger heights. Placements on recent streaming phenomena like Amazon Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty and Netflix’s Wednesday and Stranger Things, as well as HBO’s Euphoria, are launching decades-old songs like Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” and The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck” to unforeseen chart peaks. And this year, Krieg Thomas, along with her co-music supervisor, Anna Romanoff, soundtracked one of TV’s biggest new hits: Amazon Prime’s Off Campus. The duo’s onscreen song picks have been career-changing for newer acts like G Flip, The Beaches and Remi Wolf in the weeks since the show premiered in March, with its songs’ official on-demand U.S. streams increasing by as much as 46,000% from the week before episodes aired to a month after, according to Luminate.
Off Campus, based on the bestselling romance book series of the same name, tells the story of Hannah (Ella Bright), a pretty-but-she-doesn’t-know-it classical music major who, when she risks losing her scholarship, enters a pop songwriting contest offering the winner a free ride. Concurrently, she starts tutoring the school’s hockey hot shot, Garrett (Belmont Cameli), who is at risk of getting kicked off the team if he doesn’t pass his philosophy class. They make a deal: Hannah will help Garrett with his studies, and Garrett will help Hannah make her crush — a rock musician named Justin — finally notice her. Hannah and Garrett start bonding, though, and… you can probably guess what happens next.
Music is just as much of a main character in the soapy series as Hannah and Garrett. That wasn’t by chance: “There’s a lot of music referenced in the book,” explains Romanoff, 33. “But music is not quite the same driving narrative factor as it is in the show,” Krieg Thomas adds. “That was something I was immediately struck by. Yes, [Hannah’s] a musician in the book, but the show centers it in a way that the book does not.”
In episode two, for example, alt-pop artist Wolf performs multiple songs on the show as part of a campus concert, including a new Off Campus-commissioned cover of Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself,” which has since been released, earning 1.6 million official on-demand U.S. streams and counting. In the next episode, at a costume party, Hannah’s best friend, Allie — dressed in Jennifer Lopez’s iconic, plunging green 2000 Grammys dress — declares, “This is me!” when, lo and behold, Lopez and Pitbull’s “On the Floor” comes on. In the four weeks after the episode debuted, on-demand streams for the 15-year-old song spiked by 142% in the United States.
The same episode featured another prominent instance of music becoming part of the story itself, when Hannah recommends Canadian band The Beaches — and their recent Coachella set — to Garrett. Viewers get the first hint that he’s catching feelings for Hannah in a butterflies-inducing moment the next day when, as he boards the bus to a game, he looks up The Beaches on his phone. According to Laurie Lee Boutet, The Beaches’ manager, Off Campus has changed everything for the band: “It was the strongest fan acquisition moment I’ve ever seen in my life, outside of viral TikToks. My jaw was on the floor.”
The show’s inclusion of The Beaches’ “Edge of the Earth” almost functioned “like an ad,” Boutet continues. “People have called me and asked, ‘Did you pay them for this?’ I didn’t, obviously.” As is customary, music supervisors compensate artists for the use of their songs onscreen. “We just got lucky the placement was so good,” Boutet says. “It uplifted their entire catalog.” To further fuel the new interest that Off Campus generated, Boutet contacted Coachella organizers to get the 2025 performance of “Edge of the Earth” referenced in the show onto YouTube, and the festival obliged. (After the band and song names, a parenthetical in the YouTube clip title reads “for Hannah and Garrett from Off Campus,” an intentional choice by The Beaches’ team to boost traffic.)
As a result, “Edge of the Earth” grew 2,309% in official on-demand U.S. streams in the four weeks following the show’s debut and the YouTube Coachella clip has earned over 298,000 views since it was uploaded in mid-May. At Obsessed Fest, a recent Amazon Prime event in Los Angeles, the band performed alongside the cast.
“I actually still don’t think we’ve realized the full impact of the show — like, we can see it in the streaming data, but I think we’re going to see more with their next tour,” Boutet says. “Selling tickets is where you really start to see how strong the fan acquisition has been.”
If this new golden age of synchs had a bellwether moment, it may have been the release of the first season of Euphoria in June 2019, which turned Gen Zers on to a cool, eclectic mix of music ranging from Beyoncé and Labrinth to Andy Williams and Air Supply. But it truly hit a zenith in May 2022, in a climactic scene in season four of Stranger Things. Sadie Sink’s character, Max, is under the spell of a villainous force — until her friends thrust headphones onto her playing her favorite song: Kate Bush’s beloved 1985 track “Running Up That Hill.”
It felt like “a lightning-in-a-bottle moment,” Stranger Things music supervisor Norah Felder recalls. “It was just the right song with the right message.” But in the years since that synch — shorthand for the license required to “synchronize” a song with a moving picture — “Running Up That Hill” proved to be an early warning shot of a larger phenomenon to come. When first released, Bush’s song peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 30, then disappeared from the chart for almost 40 years. Thanks to Stranger Things fans, it came roaring back in June 2022 stronger than ever before at No. 8, eventually peaking at No. 3 later that summer.
“I knew this was an important moment in the show,” Felder remembers. “So I gave [showrunners the Duffer Brothers] a few ideas. I said, ‘Here’s some ideas, but FYI, I really think that “Running Up That Hill” meets all the check marks of what you’re looking for.’ It almost felt like this was written for the moment: Somebody who was struggling, who didn’t feel like she was being heard, who had this massive hill to climb and wasn’t able to do it.”
Finding a perfect song for a scene doesn’t guarantee a music supervisor will secure it. Show budgets need to be considered, and the price tag for licensing a song ranges widely depending on the stature of the artist and the nature of its use. “The price of songs has gone up quite a bit,” Jen Malone, music supervisor for Euphoria and Wednesday, recently explained to Billboard. “It was gradual, but with a real jump after the pandemic,” making it harder for music supervisors to both stay within budget and get their first-choice selections.
For music supervisors working in TV, where synch budgets are often tighter than for films, this isn’t a new challenge. One Tree Hill music supervisor Lindsay Wolfington says she remembers times when the budget couldn’t stretch any further on the show, which licensed between five and 15 songs per week in a typically 22-episode season, prompting her team to get creative and to offer “ad cards” at the end of the show. “At the end of the episode, it would say, ‘Tonight you heard music by this person,’ and then we put up the album cover of a band we’d use. We’d get a fee break for that marketing.”
In the age of Shazam and streaming, the ad card has become a relic. These days, shows like Off Campus, Stranger Things, Euphoria and The Summer I Turned Pretty still log about five to 15 needle drops per episode — but their seasons are often less than half the length of cable and network shows of the past. Plus, streaming shows often shoot episodes a year in advance of release, whereas before, episodes were sometimes shot in real time. As Romanoff notes, this can be both a blessing and a curse to a music supervisor. “A song that [was] massive as we were shooting this show in summer 2025 might feel more dated in 2026,” which may partially explain the current penchant for decades-old synchs. “Something that’s a year old that really permeated the culture today is going to feel more dated than an older, timeless song that we’re resurfacing to a newer audience.”
Even if the price is right for the artist, some high-profile talents are known for being “difficult. Well, no, that’s not the right word at all — some artists are particular,” Felder says. “It’s OK — I’m particular too. For Kate Bush, she wants to make sure the stories her songs are synched in line up with the messages she wants to be known for in her music.” Thankfully, after crafting a personal note to Bush about what the moment would mean in Stranger Things, Felder learned she was already a fan of the show — her son had showed her an episode years before. She approved the use.
That approach can work with current superstars, too. Taylor Swift, who rarely approves licenses for her music in film and TV shows, agreed to more than 20 of her songs being used across the three seasons of The Summer I Turned Pretty due to the intentionality of the placements and the connection she felt to the protagonist, Belly (Lola Tung). “This show has completely used my music in the most thoughtful, beautiful ways and [in the most] important moments in Belly’s life,” Swift told Ryan Seacrest in an interview last year. “I feel like my music comes from inside her mind.”
In the early to mid-aughts, Grey’s Anatomy helped usher in a golden age of synchs. Disney General Entertainment ConThese days, however, as musicians witness just how often a synch can change a career, they’re much more likely to give approval than they were in the early 2000s. While The Fray frontman Joe King was one of the biggest beneficiaries of that early synch wave — when his band’s “How To Save a Life” was featured on soapy medical drama Grey’s Anatomy in 2006 and, later, The OC — he wasn’t onboard with the idea immediately. “I remember I was really debating whether we should do it and was unsure,” he says. “I didn’t want it to hurt us. There was this fear of backlash back then [from] associating your art with commerce.”
After speaking with his sister and grandmother, who were Grey’s Anatomy fans, he warmed to the idea. It proved to be a wise choice. The show ultimately gave the band its first hit when “How To Save a Life” climbed to No. 3 on the Hot 100. “We didn’t write the song for the show,” he explains — but much like “Running Up That Hill,” the whole moment felt like it “was just the right place, right time, right song.”
In 2004, a representative from what was then A&M Records reached out to the producers of One Tree Hill, asking if they would consider writing Sheryl Crow into an upcoming episode to promote her new greatest-hits compilation, The Very Best of Sheryl Crow, released in November 2003. “This was the time when people realized that TV could be a marketing tool for music,” Wolfington says.
One of the executive producers was a major fan of the singer-songwriter, and Wolfington recalls Crow flying out to Los Angeles on Super Bowl Sunday to record a scene in which the artist orders a coffee at the local cafe, and one of the show’s main characters, Haley (Bethany Joy Lenz), asks Crow if she’ll play a song in lieu of paying for it. Crow obliges, heading for the cafe’s small stage and picking up her guitar to begin her cover of Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” a new track on the compilation and its first single.
“We realized, ‘Hey, if these opportunities present themselves, we should do them,’ ” Wolfington recalls of sensing that a symbiotic relationship was forming between popular artists and TV shows. Since its pilot, One Tree Hill had favored licensed pop songs over original score, including its theme song, “I Don’t Want To Be,” by fedora-wearing soft rocker Gavin DeGraw. “It didn’t feel right to have a traditional score in the show. When you’re in your teens, there’s music everywhere. Whether you’re in the art room, at a cafe, when you walk down the high school hallway — this was a showrunner decision, but it didn’t seem like a surprising mandate,” she says.
By season two, Wolfington says that One Tree Hill writers had tailored Hilarie Burton’s character, Peyton, to allow for more natural musical cameos, like Crow’s, on the show. Peyton, a rebellious cheerleader who loves music, starts working for a new all-ages club called TRIC, and over the course of the series, 12 artists (plus even more characters, like Haley) performed on One Tree Hill, many of them at TRIC.
One Tree Hill’s peak coincided with what was arguably the last true decade of teen monoculture. From the late 1990s through the 2010s, teen TV was booming — MTV’s Total Request Live felt like required viewing for anyone ages 13-19, and other young-adult programming, often on The WB and ABC Family, cornered the market on high school dramas with hits like Beverly Hills: 90210 (1990-2000), Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003), Smallville (2001-11) and The OC (2003-07). The throughline across all of this era’s material? Pop music.
On The OC, music venue The Bait Shop gave writers an excuse to get their favorite bands like The Killers on the show. WB/Courtesy Everett Collection90210 in particular pioneered writing in hangout spots for the characters that were perfectly set up for musical cameos. On 90210 it was the Peach Pit; later, in The OC, it was The Bait Shop. In a 2004 interview with TV Guide, The OC creator Josh Schwartz admitted that one reason The Bait Shop was incorporated into plotlines was so that the show’s team had an excuse to invite their favorite bands, including The Killers, Death Cab for Cutie and Modest Mouse, to play on it. It allowed them to sell Bait Shop-themed merchandise and served a narrative purpose: “We needed a parent-free place for the kids to hang out. Someplace where the Yoo-hoo flowed all night long,” Schwartz joked.
It’s hard to pinpoint precisely why this music-heavy TV trend kicked off around the turn of the 21st century and why artists finally saw the value in it. But shows like ABC’s The Wonder Years (1988-1993), an early licensor of songs for TV, certainly laid the groundwork for the phenomenon, before the success of 90210, Melrose Place, Party of Five and more in the ’90s proved there was a wide viewership for soapy teen-oriented shows with a strong affinity for pop music. And in a 2025 interview with Billboard, Jeff Waye, CEO of independent publisher Third Side Music, articulated another important factor: In the Napster age, artists didn’t have much of a choice but to take the check. “You could die on the hill of not doing synch all you wanted, but when record sales dried up in the 2000s and it got harder to make a living, things started to change,” he explained.
Methods of music consumption also changed completely between the popular shows of Krieg Thomas and Romanoff’s teen years that inspired them to become music supervisors and today’s hits like Off Campus. A fan of Crow’s performance on One Tree Hill in 2004 would have likely picked up her album at a brick-and-mortar record store, or perhaps bought the song at the iTunes Store, which had just launched the year before. For all the success of “How To Save a Life” thanks to its placement on popular TV shows, King tells Billboard he doesn’t recall anything exploding overnight in the way artists like Bush have experienced now. Billboard chart data bears that out: “How To Save a Life” debuted on the Hot 100 at No. 93 in April 2006, a month after its moment on Grey’s Anatomy, and began a slow climb up to No. 3 in October of that year. Meanwhile, Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” debuted at No. 8 just two weeks after the episode aired, peaking at No. 3 another two weeks after that.
“It was a much larger barrier to entry to relive your favorite TV moment with the music then,” explains Spotify senior editor Claire Heinichen, whose team works on the streaming service’s official companion playlists for shows like Off Campus. Wolfington recalls trying to track the impact of synchs and ad cards back in the aughts and struggling to find clear data: “There was a time when I really tried to collect the data, but I usually wouldn’t get any feedback for a while and someone would tell me, ‘Oh, album sales went up 3,000% last week.’ But it was hard to see the impact on just that one song and its success afterward.”
“Now [your favorite synch moments] live in the show, they live on your Spotify playlist, they play in your car,” Heinichen says. “You can see a fan edit of the show on your TikTok feed to the song. It’s become so that everywhere, all the time you get to live in these moments.” Spotify and other streaming services have encouraged the trend by creating official playlists that list songs featured in top TV shows or films in order of appearance for easy consumption.
“We’ve seen artists that have very deep background songs, like ones where no one would likely have pulled them out of the show, are still getting streaming bumps,” Romanoff says. “Some fans will find a song through the playlist for the show, not through the show.” As Krieg Thomas adds, “Streaming has also opened up new value for shows because, back in the day, if your show was entirely preexisting licensed songs, it was very hard to release a meaningful soundtrack. Now you can.”
Madison Norris, who leads synch licensing for music publisher and catalog buyer Round Hill Music, adds that “the growth of Netflix and Amazon Prime and Disney+ has [also] globalized the impact of a placement,” making synchs far more valuable for today’s artists than those in the aughts.
And now — at a time when over 100,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services daily, according to Luminate, and TikTok’s algorithm is less predictable than ever — landing a synch on a show like Off Campus can turn out to be a more surefire bet for an emerging artist than a viral video.
Pop singer-songwriter Carol Ades, whose song “Hope Is a Scary Thing” was used in Off Campus, says the success of the show reminded her that “people just needed to hear my music. If they just hear it, they really like it.” The track had been out for two years already by the time Off Campus debuted, and while it resonated with her core fans from day one, “Hope Is a Scary Thing” never got its breakout moment. In the four weeks since the show debuted, the song has grown by 5,595% in official on-demand U.S. streams.
“Everything is so saturated today,” Ades says. “There’s so much music, which is amazing, but you also just can’t hear it all. So it’s often an exposure game for artists. This just felt so good because I really needed that reminder of ‘Oh, right. I just need the right people to hear it.’ ”
This story appears in the July 18, 2026, issue of Billboard.