I was exposed to library music once I started frequenting www.whosampled.com and started noticing a lot of DeWolfe music was sampled. I immediately started buying up all the DeWolfe albums I could find. I mostly agree with the article here. There is some pretty amazing gems out there, but most people will not be all that impressed with your "elevator muzak". I havent checked into it as Ive not done any commercial release music in a long time, but I believe the sample clearance is much easier/cheaper with this sort of thing as that is the point of it in the first place. Also of note DeWolfe is still alive and well and has tons of material to review online. https://www.dewolfemusic.com/
The second most surprising aspect of this is that there is such a thing as the Red Bull Music Academy, and the most surprising is that it has been around as such for 21 years!
I know they have been involved in "extreme" sports of various stripes for a long time, but I wasn't aware of any programs of theirs outside of that realm.
>Notable alumni of the [Red Bull Music Academy] programme include Nina Kraviz, Objekt, Flying Lotus, Octo Octa, Courtesy, Black Coffee, Sonja Moonear, Palms Trax, Fatima, Violet, Marie Davidson, Mumdance, Nightwave, Krystal Klear, Lafawndah, Mano Le Tough, VTSS, Lucrecia Dalt, Flava D, Axel Boman, Tokimonsta, Dorian Concept, Akiko Kiyama, Sassy J and Hudson Mohawke, while guest lecturers include D'Angelo, Björk, "Mad" Mike Banks, Iggy Pop, Storm, Sheila E, Pearson Sound, Moodymann, Questlove, Goldie, Isao Tomita, Hugh Masekela and Laurent Garnier.
Ouch - sorry to hear that. Besides hooking people up with top industry professionals, since 1998 they've created loads of quality music history articles, videos with many well-known artists, and new-music compilations.
Fingers crossed that Yadastar can find another angel.
Not exactly library music, but I've found commercial music from "Extreme Production Music" to be very interesting. I love their Dark Country series. I guess the story is they hired Blues Saraceno to make commercial music, and his rock-inspired country tunes took off, they started releasing albums of it. Outlaw blues, Garage Blues series, Swamp Rock,etc, albums created for commercial sales, but they found record sales profitable, glad too.
Spotify has a Label: search, you can search entire label catalogs, and that lead me to get some really nice albums that are made for genres.
While not as cool as 60s experimental stuff, library music still exists in the modern world too as subscription services for content production companies. It can be fun to browse in it's own way.
Soulwax did a one hour mix consisting of library music called "Librarian Girl" for their "Radio Soulwax" project a small decade ago. Definitely worth checking out: https://vimeo.com/25861658
