
Last week, a reader emailed to ask “How many composers actually work in Hollywood?!” They then added: “It seems to me the same old men score all the movies”.
It’s a great question so I thought I’d take a look and, along the way, see what else I could discover about film composers.
I used my dataset of all films released in US cinemas in the thirty years between 1988 and 2017 and focused on everyone who received a composer credit.
Top composers rule the sectorAcross my dataset of thirty years of movies, 4,749 people received a composing credit. The vast majority of film composers did not work on another film after that initial credit (although they may have worked on other types …