Pop music plays varying roles in our collective and individual psyches.
The music that you love (or despise or are indifferent to) influences and affects you in countless ways, some conscious, others not.
(For the remainder of this article, as well as in any other piece with my name attached, the term “pop music” will refer not to its newer definition as a style of music, such as that made by boy bands and blonde teen divas, but to all music that is packaged and available to the masses; classical and possibly jazz music are exceptions. Reference the XTC song “This is Pop” for further insight on the subject.)
One example of pop music’s influence is its ever growing role in the world of advertising, more specifically television advertising.
Since the ’80s, the 30-second pop song snippet has almost completely replaced the advert jingle as the auditory route of influence in television advertising.
The catchy little ditty about the advertised product (“Double your pleasure/Double your fun …”), has given way to songs from everyone from Bob Seger to Andrew W.K.
Two of the earliest examples that come to mind are a pair of the ’60s most important and influential bands — The Beatles and The Beach Boys.
Remember the Sun Chips commercial with happy carefree folks frolicking on a summer’s day to a rerecorded version of “Good Day Sunshine” or the Sunkist soda commercials with “Good Vibrations” as the soundtrack to scenes of good looking people wind surfing and jet skiing?
Anyone who grew up in the ’60s and held either of these songs nostalgically close to their hearts was probably startled. However, many of them may have had the craving for multigrain chips and orange soda the next time they heard these songs on oldies radio and purchased both on their next trip to Kroger.
Granted you do have a middle ground between the jingle and the pop musician Brittany Spears (now), Michael Jackson, and Madonna (then) singing the newest incarnation of the Pepsi jingle or N’Sync singing Chili’s “I want my baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back …”
A hardcore teen pop fan would (should?) be appalled that their favorite group was whoring themselves in such a manner. I mean, what a bunch of sellouts!
Ah, sellout — what an interesting term. In reality these four artists “sold out” a long time ago (otherwise we would’ve never heard of them). So their musical contribution to the advertising world is not such an oddity, it’s even expected.
Recently though ad agencies have practiced the art of pairing music that flies under the Top 40 radar with an advertised product. It’s a brilliant technique that reaches the teen-to-middle age bracket of consumers (which is surely the largest), catching their ear, their attention and hopefully, their wallets.
There are countless examples of this recent phenomenon. Whether it’s songs by Nick Drake, Son Volt, The Creation or The Shins promoting cars, food, computers or beer, you cannot watch a batch of commercials without hearing a song written, recorded and released with an original intrinsic purpose, however serving the new function of moving product.
The Gap comes to mind as a brand that employed this technique quite skillfully. Those countless “fall into The Gap” ads a few years back brought many new and innovative artists to an audience of millions. Once obscure, and some still, artists such as Badly Drawn Boy, Ryan Adams, Missy Elliott and Rufus Wainwright as well as more established, yet respectable, musicians like Liz Phair, Sheryl Crow and Aerosmith were on screen (or in the audio) being themselves and presenting their musical identities is such a manner that it actually seemed hip.
These ads never had the feel of traditional commercials, but short, basic, tasteful music videos. Nonetheless it made many head to the mall and fork over a hundred bucks for a sweater and pair of jeans.
The Gap even aided in resurrecting a musical and cultural phenomenon — swing dancing. Their use of Louie Prima’s “Jump Jive An’ Wail” in their “Khakis Swing” ad campaign predated The Brian Setzer Orchestra’s hit version by at least six months. This song temporarily revived his celebrity and paved the way for other neo-swing band’s 15 … er, five minutes of fame.
For a few months in 2000, masses of young people were learning these dances that their grandparents did 50 years earlier. If it hadn’t been for the initial introduction from The Gap, the brief swing craze may never have occurred.
Swing dancing and Big Band music, however, was not a dead art form. Small, albeit passionate, groups of people in every major U.S. city lived for the weekends when they would hit the town for a night of jitterbugging decked out in fedoras, zoot suits, and vintage dresses. Surely these zealous purists were appalled at the commercial use (or to them, exploitation) of their cherished art form. The rest of the world was getting a watered down version of their specific lifestyle. To them it was nothing short of blasphemy.
This same reaction is common to many people who hold underground music close to their heart and witness the masses, through television advertisements, get a glimpse into their cherished little worlds.
Many who are passionate about a specific art form (and for the sake of this article we will limit this to popular music) are cloistered in tiny milieus. I am one of these people.
We are the ones who quit listening to commercial radio years ago. We are the ones who can and will talk your ear off about a band you’ve never even heard of.
We own turntables. We buy vinyl. We read Magnet and Q, but never Rolling Stone (or at least we won’t admit it to our brethren).
We think that our taste in music is light years ahead of what makes the playlists of MTV, not that it matters because we stopped watching MTV ever since they took 120 Minutes off the air. We quit listening to a band if they have a mainstream hit; yet we revel in the fact that we heard of them first.
We travel great lengths to see concerts. We love thrift stores and used record shops. We are usually fairly intelligent, almost always white, middle-class and overwhelmingly male. We are purists and we love to complain. We are a self-righteous minority. Most importantly we are selfish.
We want to keep the music we attach importance to as far away from the masses as humanly possible. We feel (and some would say know) that if music that we have deemed worthy and claimed as our own reaches the masses it will become completely void of any relevance and the artistic point will be lost to the rest of humanity, especially if it is tied in with a product.
Such is the reason I used to be vehemently opposed to the use of left of center music being used in commercials. That was until a few years ago when one specific television commercial changed my whole outlook on the topic.
Around the late spring of 2000, Carnival Cruise Lines, the zenith of family-oriented tropical hedonism, ran a series of TV spots that for me serves as the most unintentionally ironic display of advertising blunder.
This commercial showed clips of happy, upper middle class people having what looked like the grandest of times, frolicking about on a Carnival Cruise ship. The song used to accentuate this vacation bliss was the chorus of Iggy Pop’s time-tested anthem, “Lust for Life.”
I was immediately disgusted by the notion that one of my personal musical heroes, an indisputably seminal artist, had whored himself out for the almighty buck. I was truly disappointed.
Then it hit me. “Lust for Life” isn’t about living it up on a seven-day cruise to the Cayman Islands. It’s about shooting up heroin! Here are all these people soaking up the sun, swimming, snorkeling, dancing, and whatever else they do on cruise ships to a song about getting bombed out on smack.
Did some ad executive come to a meeting with the thought “Shuffleboard and sun tanning … hmm, well that’s like hypnotizing chickens?” Probably not.
After such absurdity, how could I not help becoming comfortable with the idea of advertisers using “my music” in their commercials? The experience truly opened my eyes.
Iggy probably made great money for licensing his song in the Carnival commercial. He almost certainly made as much or more than he ever made on the sales of some of his albums.
The world of copyright and intellectual property is a lucrative business, and if someone wants to use a song badly enough they’ll cough up great amounts of money to do so.
The great majority of the bands that my indie rock kinfolk and I are fans of do not live like the stereotypical rock star. They must make albums, tour, and sell merchandise just to get by. Most of them are no more finically stable than we are (which might be part of the attraction). If a company wants to use a song in one of its commercials, many of these bands could reap financial gain. Financial gain that is the likes of which they’ve never seen.
A few years ago, Apples in Stereo, a critically acclaimed and well-recognized indie band from Denver, licensed the song “Strawberryfire,” a nugget of Beatle-esque neo-psychedelia to Sony for a commercial. Not surprisingly many of their fans were insulted and certain journalists branded them as sellouts.
Despite this backlash, the band came out on top. This corporate money allowed The Apples to purchase better musical necessities (instruments, recording gear, decent transportation), breathe a little easier and come more productive because they didn’t have to work their normal days jobs.
More recently a few artists have actually had legitimate hits due solely to advertising.
Following The Gap’s lead, last year Mitsubishi brought in new sounds to help sell cars.
However, unlike some of the artists linked to Gap ads who received critical acclaim but failed to connect with the masses (Badly Drawn Boy, Rufus Wainwright) a couple of songs that Mitsubishi used became minor radio hits. Dirty Vegas’ “Days Go By” and “Start the Commotion” by The Wiseguys both struck a nerve in radio and MTV and were in constant rotation for a few months. Granted these were strictly one hit wonders, yet these groups reached a peak that they never would have if it weren’t for the commercial licensing of their songs.
Some respectable artists, however, choose to take the high road and vow to never allow commercial use of their songs. Two examples that come to mind are Beck and REM.
While this is in many ways commendable, and really does somehow make their artistry more artistic, both of these bands can afford such moral luxury.
Unlike Iggy Pop or The Apples in Stereo, neither act is hard up for money. Beck and REM are of the handful of musicians that can make challenging music, yet afford not to be worried about finances.
However some of these artists that are in this same privileged group as Beck and REM do go ahead and sell their songs to the advertisers, and they laugh all they way to the bank.
British superstars Blur and eccentric electro-pop guru Moby both have no problem with it. They stand out not only because they are established acts that really don’t need the extra money, but when it comes to cuddling up with advertisers, they really don’t know where to draw the line.
Blur only whored out one song, the modern rocker “Song 2” (yeah, yeah, yeah the “Whoo Hoo” song), but they gladly gave almost anyone free reign to advertise with the song. As a result, to most Americans Blur will not be know for their ground breaking ’90s Brit-pop genius, but for that one song that no one could get away from for a year or so.
The difference with Moby was that instead of just licensing one song over and over, he licenses every song over and over.
All 18 songs on 18, the follow up to the smash album, Play, were licensed to different advertisers months before it was in stores.
While his method seems very over the top and in many ways superficial, he’s a worldwide icon and a very wealthy man because of it.
Regardless of your opinion on the subject, pop music as a means of advertising is here to stay. Whether you enjoy hearing new or familiar songs in commercials or cringe even at the thought, it’s becoming more and more a fact of life.
I think we all agree it’s better than those jingles that stick in your head for days. No one really wants to have to exorcise the Mentos jingle from their head. If they do, they should visit the nearest priest or shrink.

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