I'm pretty sure this is from the 80s.  I have long since been looking for a copy of this song and more info about it.  The only places I've heard it is when they roll the long line of weekend sports scores on the 9 & 10 Michigan news, and it is the theme song for the PBS series Great Lakes Outdoors.

I was able to get a hold of Rob from Great Lakes Outdoors and he said the song was called "Power To Spare" and he got it off a CD that was made for TV and radio, and he doesn't know the artist.  He got it back in 1989 or so.

It is a powerful instrumental song.  It seems to be loosely based on Frank Stallone's "Far From Over".

I was able to get a hold of Rob from Great Lakes Outdoors and he said the song was called "Power To Spare" and he got it off a CD that was made for TV and radio, and he doesn't know the artist.  He got it back in 1989 or so.


We've got your back!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wrg8k4-9JU

Or rather, the robots from YouTube have your back :) 

It's on a release from a "group" called Network Music Ensemble, and you want Track 5 from Corporate Pursuit, on eMusic, Amazon, or iTunes. 

Network Music Ensemble appears to be the musical equivalent of stock photography.  342 albums, and I can't find a website, nor any other evidence they exist beyond 342 albums on Amazon.com. 

Now let's take this to the next level: can anyone out there find anything about this mysterious "Network Music Ensemble"?  They've been doing this for more than 20 years, they're obviously still in business, and yet they have no net presence.  No corporate website, no "about us" on their storefronts at the major electronic music download houses, not even a way to find out how to use their stuff and pay 'em royalties.  What's up with that?

Wow thanks!  I'm still stuck with dialup that maxes out at 26400, but I know guys at work with iTunes who can get it for me.

I'd like to know more about this company too.  Power to Spare is a great song, I wonder what other good stuff they got.  With 342 albums the chances are good.

Wow thanks!  I'm still stuck with dialup that maxes out at 26400, but I know guys at work with iTunes who can get it for me.

I'd like to know more about this company too.  Power to Spare is a great song, I wonder what other good stuff they got.  With 342 albums the chances are good.


It might be very much like stock photography - they solicit things like "inspirational corporate stuff" or "good sports themes" to a bunch of songwriters (photographers), and when they get scores/songs/tablature/etc, they pay a small royalty, toss the info to the house band, do their recording of it, and charge a small royalty for its use (or just charge $6 for a CD that comes with a license) to film directors who need intro/outro music for clip shows, theme music, etc.

Attention Internet Reader: We don't care how old this thread is.  Does anyone out there know anything about "Network Music Ensemble"?  They're so prolific that their links on major music distribution sites swamp out any corporate presence they may have.  Who are they, where do they get their stuff, and how much of their stuff have we been listening to - in 30-to-60-second theme songs - for the past 20+ years without knowing it?

9&10 in Upper Michigan wasn't the only TV station to run that music :)...WVII, the ABC station in Bangor ME, used that news theme in the mid to late 80s, for its newscast called NewsPlus 7. The newscast would rebrand in the early 90s, and is now known as ABC7 News after a handful of title changes.

So there were things I did not expect tonight.

First:  Giddy Up by Network Music Ensemble has been ponified after its appearance on the Hub in a commercial.  It's a small world, but eventually, all of its music will be pony.  (1108 down, 8,999,998,892 to go)

Second:  Thanks, Bluenoser!  Without your post, I wouldn't have looked up Network Music Ensemble, and without that, I wouldn't have learned that in the past couple of years, we're no longer the the only forum with members who are aware of the existence of Network Music Ensemble's library of music.

According to this thread at librarymusicthemes, many of the compositions were from Craig Palmer, who was one of NME's in-house composers, along with Clark Gault and Larry Owens.  They were originally released only on vinyl.  This gentleman has a friend with access to the full vinyl library.  He writes about Network Music Ensemble as follows:


My best friend has the actual Network catolog that came with all the LP's he has. Pretty much they're split into a few different catogories....Contemporary, Industrial, etc and there's no specific titles of the volumes like with the UK and Euro libraries. They're just numbered NM01, NM02, etc.

Pretty much when diving into this library....if your looking for the jammin funk/disco or jazz/easy listening type stuff of the era, the Contemporary or Slow Tempo genre labeled LP's would be the ones your after. If your into the electronic/ambient or news music type stuff, you'd go for the Industrial genre labeled ones (though on the rare occasion, you'll find a disco or funk jam slipped into one of these).

...

None of the full original Network albums are available anywhere other than the original vinyls. However, most of the "full mix/full length" cuts of almost every LP from 1979 - 1985 are available on their archive buy out discs via Killer Tracks and a small handful are commercially available digitally (I-Tunes, etc) under the alias The Network Music Ensemble. 

...

Killer Tracks is who now owns the Networkmusic catalog. You can contact someone there to work out licencing, etc. This is their website: http://www.killertracks.com/


Having recovered from the shock of someone remembering Network Music Ensemble, I spent some time browsing threads on the board, which brings me to the third thing I didn't expect tonight.

Third:  I was aware of music libraries, but what I really wasn't expecting to find tonight was that there is an entire community dedicated to preserving library music as an art form.

We at inthe00s.com are good at the stuff that hit the airwaves and the dance clubs, but this is deeper underground than that.  If you have an obscure piece of music associated with a TV station, newscast, corporate video, video news release, or other bit of content, I'm pretty sure that http://librarymusicthemes.boardhost.com should be among your first destinations.  There are several people on Library Music Themes who have archives (or access to archives) of this material and they appear to have memories for library music that reach back about as far as ours do for pop music; they can recognize snippets of production music, even instrumental pieces, that date back 30-40 years. 

And that's what keeps me coming back here, night after night.  I never know what I'm going to learn here, even a couple of years after one of our threads have been solved.  Thanks again, Bluenoser, you've made my night.