The return of the soundtrack: how original movie music made a comeback

Big summer bets such as F1 and The Smurfs are using stars like Rihanna and Tate McRae to appeal to a wider audience

Posters for the Brad Pitt Formula One race car drama advertise it, with a heavy dose of cheese, as F1 the Movie. But maybe the Spaceballs-like distinction is necessary, given the existence of F1 the Album, a soundtrack nearly as starry as the movie it accompanies. Maybe starrier: Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Kerry Condon and Shea Whigham probably can’t overpower the combination of Don Toliver, Doja Cat, Tate McRae, Ed Sheeran, Rosé, Dom Dolla and Chris Stapleton. This isn’t the only recent compilation to bring back the very early-to-mid-2000s moniker of “the Album”; Twisters: the Album, a 29-track country compilation, reached the Billboard top 10 in the US last summer. Rihanna, a massive pop star who hasn’t released an album in almost a decade, put out her first new song in ages on a little record called Smurfs Movie Soundtrack (Music From & Inspired By). (She plays Smurfette in the new cartoon.) Soundtracks, those mainstays of mall CD stores, are back – in streaming and vinyl form.

For decades, the idea of pop music soundtrack albums needing a comeback would have been deeply strange; they’ve been a presence more or less since the late 1960s new Hollywood inflection point of The Graduate, with its foregrounded Simon & Garfunkel hits and written-for-the-film Mrs Robinson. But by the late 2000s, soundtrack albums were perfectly engineered to go down with the music industry ship. For much of the 1990s, the industry did their best to steer music buyers away from cheap, easily attainable singles by often holding them from standalone release and forcing the purchase of a $19 CD for anyone who wanted a copy of a hit song. Soundtracks offered further scarcity, imprisoning non-album tracks that might have once served as B-sides on cheap 7in singles. Hardcore fans might be willing to fork over their money for a particularly good or rare one, getting exposure to some like-minded artists in the bargain. Popular ones could even inspire their own sequels.