Production Music Association Announces Nominees for the 12th Annual Mark Awards
If you're in any way involved in music synchronization, supervision, licensing, broadcasting, or sound design, we don't need to explain how central production music is to the industry. Once a year, the people who write, license, and place that music get their moment in the spotlight, and this year's nominee list is a reminder of just how far the craft has come.
The Production Music Association, one of the industry's central awarding bodies for recognizing excellence and achievement across the global production music community, has announced its nominees for the 12th Annual Mark Awards.
The awards are named for the late Andy Mark, a longtime production music library owner and founding member of the PMA, whose legacy runs through much of how the industry operates today.
This year's field is packed: seventy-seven nominated entries across 24 categories, covering production music created and used in film, television, advertising, trailers, sports, and digital media. As always, entries went through a blind judging process, evaluated by working professionals in production music, licensing, and music supervision.
The category breakdown honors storytelling, with 16 Production Music Track of the Year categories sitting alongside eight Best Use of Production Music categories and underscoring how much weight the industry places on context.
On the publisher side, APM Music leads the pack with 11 nominated entries, followed closely by Sony Production Music and Extreme with nine apiece, and ENSO and Infinity Scores each landing seven nominations. Also appearing across the list are West One Music Group, MYMA, Flippermusic, London Sync, Slipstream Music, Warner Chappell Production Music, VideoHelper, BMG Production Music, Audio Network, and a long tail of others.
At Synchtank, we love seeing friendly faces, partners and customers getting some well-deserved recognition for their hard work and innovation. It's wonderful to see so many talented teams in production music celebrated this year.
Genre-wise, the nominees range from orchestral and electronic to hip-hop, jazz, Latin, pop, rock, and international styles. A few entries stand out for how they reinterpret familiar material, such as a custom trailer remix of Seal's "Kiss from a Rose," a fresh arrangement of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons – Summer," and a new take on Chopin's "Waltz in A Minor".
“The Mark Awards are about celebrating the incredible human talent at the heart of Production Music - the composers and songwriters creating the music we hear across media every day. The standard this year is exceptional, and I’m really looking forward to celebrating that talent together in LA. We’ve got a fantastic line-up of presenters and performers, and we’ll also be sharing some exciting news about the future of the Mark Awards. It’s shaping up to be a great night - see you there!” - John Clifford, Mark Awards Committee Chair
Winners will be revealed at the 12th Annual Mark Awards ceremony on Tuesday, October 6, from 5:00–7:00 p.m. PT at the Hilton Los Angeles/Universal City. The show is part of the broader Production Music Conference, running October 6–8, 2026.
We can’t wait to watch along. Make sure you do too by registering for the 2026 Production Music Conference below.
Great to see the Production Music Association spotlighting so many composers — the Mark Awards always remind me how much unsung work goes into scoring. Cue libraries do a lot of heavy lifting in games too, especially horror visual novels. I was replaying one recently and the ambient tracks carried half the dread; if you want to see how tightly music and mood can be woven, the false sun guide walks through a boy's love story turned nightmare and all 20 endings. It's a good reminder that production music shapes narrative more than we admit.
Congrats to everyone nominated — the Mark Awards always remind people how much craft goes into production music that audiences never consciously notice. As someone who scores to picture, I know the strange mental fatigue that sets in after hours of juggling briefs, cue titles and revisions. When I need a five-minute reset that still keeps my head in "word" mode, I'll play poople — endless word ladders, no daily cap, no download, so I can start a fresh game whenever a session stalls. Then it's straight back to the DAW. Curious which category feels most stacked this year.
Always great to see the Mark Awards shine a light on the people behind the scenes — production music is one of those crafts where a single cue can travel from a studio in Stockholm to a broadcast in São Paulo without most listeners ever knowing who wrote it. That borderless quality is exactly what makes this community so interesting to follow. It's also why I've gotten hooked on geography guessing between sessions; I've been killing time on playworldguesser.com, dropping into random street views and trying to figure out which country I've landed in. Silly, but genuinely addictive. Congrats to all this year's nominees!
Great to see the PMA spotlighting the production music community with the 12th Annual Mark Awards nominees — these composers rarely get enough credit for how much they shape a player's experience with a single loop or sting. I kept thinking about that recently while grinding low-poly browser racers, where a tight synth pulse genuinely makes every corner feel faster. PolyTrack is a good example; I picked up cleaner lines after reading playpolytrack.com/guides/how-to-drift-in-polytrack, and the arcade energy keeps pulling me back. Curious who takes home the trophies this year.
The 12th Annual Mark Awards nominees highlight how essential production music remains across sync, supervision, licensing, and sound design. Great snapshot of the craft’s evolution—I've been using https://viduai.site