Do listings ever tell you the actual scene you're writing for?

[DanGalasso]

I've watched a bunch of Taxi TV and regularly Michael will mention some details about a scene and then explain why certain songs may or may not be a good fit for a scene like that, which is awesome advice.

Having said that, I've not seen any mention in any of the listings of what the client need is beyond the example tracks and a description of the style they're looking for without any contextual visual I can ..uhhmmm.. visualize (I kind of painted myself into a corner there linguistically), which may help me nail these pitches a little better.

Wondering if there's ever a situation where a listing comes through where you'll be given an idea of what the scene is that you'll actually be writing for?

Thanks all!

[mattbee]

If we're talking actual songs, many listings would be for catalogues where a song could be used for different purposes, so they're probably not running the listing with a specific scene in mind. There might be an occasional listing where there is something visual there, or it says they're looking to replace song xyz, but not often. Probably because the company's running the listing also don't know exactly what it would be used for yet.
If you mean instrumentals as well as songs, then the answer is the difference between production music and scoring to film as a composer - one is multi-use, created and then an editor would choose from which ones they think would suit, but if a show wants something specific written for a specific scene, that crosses more into the scoring side of things. (Apologies if that was over-explaining what you already knew!) My advice is to just embrace the references given - sometimes it can be hard enough deciphering exactly what is needed when the musical language is there in plain english, without needing to make it more ambiguous and open to interpretation with visual references.