About this room

The Cue Room is an independent editorial reference on production and library music: the catalogs that hold it, the licenses that move it, the sessions that record it and the printed volumes that outlived the CD. It is written for the person who has to answer a practical question about that music, whether they are cutting a documentary, clearing a cue, cataloguing a shelf or trying to find out who played on a session thirty years ago.

What an entry contains

Each entry takes exactly one question about production music. The answer comes first, in the opening paragraphs, before any history. What follows is written so a reader can jump to the part they need: what a catalog number encodes, what a license covers and leaves out, how a cue sheet is filled in, what a session day looks like, what a printed booklet holds that a file does not.

Where the material comes from

An entry is written from documents that can be read: published catalogs and their booklets, the standard terms of a library license, the cue sheet forms used by broadcasters and performing rights organisations, discographies, and the technical literature on recording and digitisation. The sources are named at the end of the entry. Where the documents do not settle a question, the entry says so rather than guessing.