He teaches film-music history in the scoring program at the University of Southern California and hosts the monthly Dolby Creator podcasts with film composers. He formerly hosted the Webby-nominated For Scores podcast for the Disney Company.

He has won ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism three times. One of those was for the fifth of his seven books: The Music of James Bond, published in 2012. Since then, he has written Music for Prime Time, an acclaimed history of American television themes and scoring, and his latest, Dreamsville: Henry Mancini, "Peter Gunn" and Music for TV Noir, about how a little-known composer's unexpected success scoring a TV detective series propelled him to fame and fortune.

Burlingame's earlier books include Sound and Vision: 60 Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks and, with co-authors Geoff Leonard and Pete Walker, Music by John Barry. He has written the liner notes for dozens of albums and has produced a series of CDs of classic spy music from the 1960s (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible and others).