Leading New York-based music and sound design company Sound Lounge Music & Sound Design (SLMSD) announces its partnership with artist management and licensing company Stray Dog Music to form a new Music Supervision unit. The collaboration expands SLMSD's current presence, capabilities and scope allowing them to meet the needs of their growing client base. Partners/Producers Erik Steinert and Axel Niehaus launched Stray Dog in 1996 as a production and artist development company. Over the years, Stray Dog has evolved into a music licensing firm due to their relationships with artists and ability to cultivate and identify new talent. Axel and Erik have worked on production of an impressive array of top artists including: Alicia Keyes, Stevie Wonder, Carly Simon, The Roots, P-Diddy, The Replacements and Mary J. Blige.
“Axel and Erik bring an added dimension to the creative services at SLMSD,” says Sound Lounge Partner and Sound Designer Marshall Grupp. “The ability to offer expert music supervision and licensing allows us to accommodate the needs of both our advertising clients as well as the feature film and television series communities.”

Stray Dog Music has created a massive network of tastemakers, labels, bloggers, journalists, managers, lawyers, store owners, radio programmers and promoters. This network keeps them plugged into developing scenes all over the world. “By the time SPIN Magazine is talking about the new scene in Indiana, we already have The Black Diamond Heavies and The Giggles in our catalog,” says Partner Erik Steinert.

Understanding the needs of the agencies as well as the artists they represent is what sets Stray Dog apart, in no small part because Axel and Erik are accomplished producers themselves. In their 10 plus year of working with major artists, Stray Dog has developed relationships with all of the major publishers and many of the smaller ones. “Sure we have 4000 pre-cleared, indie titles in our catalog but that doesn’t really tell the story,” says Niehaus. “There are a number of websites cropping up with thousands of cleared titles neatly arranged in drop-down menus for you to spend hours searching through, however a database isn’t going to tell you what is good and hot and it certainly won’t save you any time.” The Stray Dog philosophy of music supervision begins with the project. “We have never completed a job that ended with the same music it had in the brief,” continues Axel, “They always seem to travel between styles, genres, licensed vs. composed, iconic vs. indie…our value is in the ability to deliver quality music, quickly, whether it is a huge iconic hit record, an indie band about to explode, an original piece of music composed by one of our in-house composers, or even a new custom song by one of our many indie bands and writers from around the world.”
Recent credits for Stray Dog include a four spot campaign for Buick via Digitas featuring Tiger Woods, Nike, American Express and moveon.org featuring Barack Obama.

About Sound Lounge Music & Sound Design:
Established in the Spring of 2006, Sound Lounge Music & Sound Design (SLMSD) is part of Sound Lounge, New York’s premier audio post production studio. SLMSD builds upon the long term success of veteran Sound Designer Marshall Grupp and is headed by Executive Producer Marcus Smith. The recent partnership with artist management and licensing company Stray Dog Music, founded by Partners/Producers Erik Steinert and Axel Niehaus gives SLMSD a newly formed Music Supervision unit which in combination with Sound Lounge’s renowned mixing capabilities now offers not only state of the art original music, re-records, re-mixes and sound design but also music searches, clearances and a cutting edge pre-cleared licensing catalog with hundreds of international buzz bands.