The Room Where It Happens: Syncstate Is Bringing Sync Licensing Into the Open

For the first time, the people who decide what music makes it to film, TV, and advertising will sit in front of emerging artists and show their work. What happens next could change everything.

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There’s a version of the sync licensing world that most independent artists only glimpse from the outside. Music gets chosen. A film scene lands differently because of it. A single placement can shift a career trajectory in ways that years of touring can’t. But how decisions actually get made, what songs actually get picked, and why some artists keep landing placements while others keep spinning their wheels? That part has always stayed behind closed doors.

Syncstate, the sync-focused platform born out of the partnership between Toronto-based Wracket Music Supervision and Beatcave, is opening those doors.

On May 7th, as part of Toronto’s Departure Festival + Conference, Syncstate will present “Battle of the Music Supervisors & Sync Reps” at Departure House, and it’s exactly the kind of event the sync world has never seen before. Not a panel. Not a networking mixer where industry insiders speak in carefully hedged generalities. Instead, it’s an interactive live experience where music supervisors and sync representatives break down what the placement process actually looks like, in real time, in front of the artists who need that knowledge most.

The concept is rooted in a simple but radical idea: transparency is access. Wracket Music Supervision, founded by Everton Lewis Jr. and recognized as one of Toronto’s most respected boutique supervision agencies, has built its reputation on creative, impact-driven placements for film, television, and major brand campaigns.

Beatcave, the independent music platform and creative community, has spent years focused on building direct lines between artists and the people and resources that actually move the needle on a music career. Syncstate sits at the intersection of those two worlds, a dedicated space for artists, producers, and songwriters to get genuine insight into the business of sync without the gatekeeping.

The lineup assembled for this event makes the point plainly. Matthew Hearon-Smith is a film and TV music supervisor whose recent credits include Anora, the Sean Baker film that took home the Best Picture award at the Academy Awards. Hearon-Smith has spent years cutting his teeth in the New York indie film world while simultaneously developing in-house music strategy at major media companies, giving him an unusually complete view of how sync operates at every budget level and across every type of production. When he talks about what makes a song work in a scene, he’s drawing on thousands of real decisions, not hypotheticals.

Josh Rabinowitz brings a scope that’s almost hard to fully absorb. Over a career that has touched more than 10,000 tracks, Rabinowitz served as Music Head at Grey for fourteen years and before that spent seven and a half years at Y&R. He was the first-ever Music Jury President at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the global benchmark for advertising excellence, and has since built Brooklyn Music Experience into a consultancy that helps artists and brands navigate an industry that, as he’d likely be the first to tell you, reinvents itself constantly. As a professor at Berklee, The New School, and Brooklyn College, he’s also spent years translating industry insight into something that actually lands for emerging creators. He’s the rare person who holds both the big commercial picture and the granular cultural detail in his head at the same time.

Cheryl Link brings the publishing dimension that so many sync conversations either skip over or only address superficially. As General Manager of Peermusic Canada, she sits at the top of one of the most significant institutions in global music publishing. Peermusic operates across 39 offices in 33 countries and holds or administers well over a million titles. Link has been with the company since 2005 and was most recently elevated to General Manager, overseeing creative, operations, and synchronization activity for the Canadian market. She also sits on the boards of SOCAN and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and was a founding member of the MPC Women in the Studio program. Her presence in this room matters because the publishing side of sync is where so many independent artists lose the thread, and she’s one of the clearest voices in the business when it comes to helping creators understand how their rights actually work.

Mark Garfield arrives from the UK representing Pop-Up Music, the Ivor Novello-nominated publisher and sync agency he co-founded. The placements speak for themselves: Stranger Things, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Fallout, The Night Manager 2, a Love Story documentary about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. Garfield has also collaborated as a musician with people like Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols and Dr. Fink of Prince’s band, which means he understands the creative side of the equation from the inside, not just as a licensing executive looking for content that fits a brief. Alongside his agency work, he’s been a regular speaker on international sync panels and has served as a judge for the Unsigned Only Music Awards, a competition built specifically for independent artists.

Rounding out the room is Danica Bansie, a music supervisor at PIRATE SOUND whose background cuts across music photography, writing, marketing, and now supervision. With over a decade in the industry and a foundation in communications, she brings a perspective particularly attuned to the space where independent artists operate, where the DIY ethos and the commercial music business still feel like separate planets.

That’s the point Syncstate is trying to close the distance on. Independent creators are sitting on placements they’ll never land not because their music isn’t right for it, but because they’ve never had a meaningful look at what right actually means in practice. Sync licensing has historically required either industry relationships most artists don’t have, or a kind of institutional knowledge that doesn’t travel easily. An event like this doesn’t pretend those barriers don’t exist. It tries to give the people on the outside enough working knowledge to change their own odds.

Departure itself has grown into one of the most important music industry gatherings in the country, building on decades of groundwork laid by Canadian Music Week and expanding into a genuine cross-industry conference with its Sync Summit as one of four focused programming tracks for 2026. That Syncstate is presenting its flagship event within that context isn’t coincidental. It’s a statement about where both organizations see the conversation heading.

There’s more to come. The Syncstate partnership is designed to grow, and the Departure event is positioned as a first step rather than a destination. The goal is to keep creating structured opportunities for music creators to get in front of the right people, not occasionally and not by accident, but as part of a consistent, purposeful effort to make the sync world more navigable for independent talent.

For any artist who’s ever wondered what the people on the other side of a placement decision are actually looking for, May 7th at Departure House is the clearest answer that’s ever been publicly assembled.