Hans Zimmer, Bleeding Fingers, and the Evolution of Library Music

This chapter examines the music of peak TV through a study of Bleeding Fingers, a media-music production company based in Santa Monica, CA. Established in 2013 as a collaboration between composer Hans Zimmer and library-music company Extreme Music, Bleeding Fingers has provided original scores for a range of peak TV series, including the BBC’s Planet Earth II (2016) and Around the World in 80 Days (2021). Whilst the company’s marketing materials foreground these custom compositions for premium series, Bleeding Fingers has also delivered another kind of musical content—library music—for use in a raft of non-peak titles, including Family Food Fight (ABC) and MasterChef (Fox). The company’s reliance on the same in-house composers, studio facilities, and production workflows across both custom scores and library music serves to complicate the distinctions between these types of music, and by extension, between the sonic content of peak and non-peak TV. By examining Bleeding Fingers’ production processes—centred around issues of branding and authorship—this study focuses on the convergent relationship between custom scoring and library music in the company’s TV projects, and explores the resultant implications for composers in the contemporary screen industries. Through providing an original definition of peak TV that extends beyond (certain types of) TV drama, the chapter also unpacks wider issues concerning how music can be used to both construct and problematize the borders of peak TV.