The entertainment industry remains deep in mourning over the death of Robin Kaye, the longtime music supervisor for American Idol, who was found murdered along with her husband, Thomas Deluca, in their home in an apparent double homicide.
Kaye’s contemporaries are remembering her as a consummate professional who had a keen talent for working with creatives, and for her stewardship as an advocate in championing the music supervision profession as a whole.
“She was a fierce advocate of supervisors, she was a smooth, pragmatic and calming presence to all of us,” veteran producer and a founding member of the Guild of Music Supervisors Jonathan McHugh tells The Hollywood Reporter. “She was working with the Guild early, she produced our award show, she believed in the goal of helping improve the craft and make sure the bigger supervisors were helping the smaller ones.”
Jill Meyers, who spent over a decade as music supervisor on rival music contest The Voice, said she shared a close bond together with Kaye and Ginsburg, adding that “it felt like we worked for each other, three people from competing shows who loved each other and constantly did our best to help and boost the others up.”
Maureen Crowe, the Guild’s founding president, called Kaye “such a bright light in our community,” lauding her efforts as an early Guild board member and vice president, and for her work on building out the Guild of Music Supervisors Award show.
“She was empowered with an incredible skill set to make great things happen, and she put those skills to work in the service of others to empower them and help them succeed,” Crowe said. “Her legacy will continue inspire. She and Tom will more sorely missed.”
While Kaye’s reach in the business was wide, those successes she’d cultivated for others is most apparent with Idol, which had imparted her with more influence compared to the more typical music supervision assignment. Aside from the incredibly high number of clearances she had to get done for the show, while a more typical program selects songs merely to soundtrack a particular moment, on a singing contest, those clearances can decide an artist’s career.
“If they get the right song, that can be the difference in having a career or not,” McHugh says. “In a way, Robin’s work was a gateway for nurturing artists’ careers. Sometimes artists got 30 seconds, a minute to get a thumbs up or down, Robin was the kind of person that would always go to the wall and make sure that if that’s the song that someone wanted, she would try to get there if she could.”
Idol judge Randy Jackson said on Instagram this week that Kaye “consistently went the extra mile, meticulously ensuring songs were placed and cleared for the show.”
One of her more famous cases was securing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” for Adam Lambert in 2009, a notable success given how notoriously protective Zeppelin is about permitting its music for use on film and TV.
“We always were talking about Led Zeppelin because everybody knew that we couldn’t do Led Zeppelin,” Kaye recalled in an interview in 2009. “I think Adam brought it up and I said, ‘no, you can’t do it.’ When we started really seeing how talented Adam was, I had a feeling they would consider him. I couldn’t have asked them just in general ‘let us do it this year.’ They wouldn’t have said yes, but it made sense with Adam.”
“It’s always worth asking,” Kaye continued. “I never take a ‘no’ from anybody as a permanent ‘no.’ This business changes too much and situations change.”
As Kaye’s longtime friend Jacquie Perryman, a consultant for Paul McCartney’s MPL Music Publishing, remembers: “She was particularly good at advising artists and creatives. She could really help find music for the younger kids who maybe didn’t know the older songs.”
Perryman says Kaye was like a sister to her, adding that they first worked together in the ’90s after she hired Kaye at PolyGram to build out the label’s licensing department. Kaye, Perryman says, was “completely respected and liked because she was an authentic person who didn’t put on airs.”
“I screamed when I heard the news, it’s so devastating,” she says. “Robin and Tom were in the prime of their lives, they were lovely people who were good to everyone around them.”
Both McHugh and Perryman emphasize that it was Kaye’s unmatched relationships with music publishers that gave her an edge in the business.
“She could actually clear amazing songs for the show because her reputation and her relationships were parallel to none,” Perryman says. “The business has a lot of egos, but she was able to work with everybody. She wasn’t a self-promoter at all, she didn’t make it about her. She just believed music supervision was a job that people should recognize and respect. And she loved artists, and she loved music.”
Additional reporting by Fred Bronson
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