maleficent

To this day, I can't hear the song "Like a Rock" by Bob Seger and teh Silver Bullet Band without flashing to the Chevy trucks commercial... Now, watching tv tonite, I caught the new Buick ads using Aerosmith's "Dream On" as the music for it - -and the tag line, is Dream Up.

Any other songs that are now linked to commercials that you either wish did or didn't happen. How about some songs that should be linked to products.

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pinkie

Do You Realize ~ The Flaming Lips

Mitsubishi used it sorta recently. I actually thought it was pretty cool that after 20 years they finally were reaping the benefits of all of their awesome music and hard work.

I don't like Bob Segar or Chevy anything anyway...

frankx

I generally loath when they use classic rock to sell products, especially songs I grew up listening to, but as the 70's are long gone, there are probably just not that many people buying Bob Seger albums anymore (not to rag on ol' Bob, he's just an example). As much as I hate the idea, I would probably do the same thing in their shoes.

I just hate annoying commercials in general. Any music is just an extra fingernail on the blackboard.

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CinnamonGirl

I can't remember which company, but I saw a car commercial a few months ago that used "Bohemian Like You" by the Dandy Warhols. I was not amused.

The commercials themselves don't annoy me... but the fact that my 15 year old cousin refers to some of my favorite songs as "the (insert company name here) commercial" is a bit irritating.

There is one commercial I like that uses a song... again, I don't remember the company, but the one where the couple is in a parking lot; the girl is sitting outside, looking bored and somewhat annoyed, the guy is sitting in the car listening to American Pie, and later makes a comment (when he gets out of the car and joins his girlfriend) that you have to listen to the WHOLE SONG. It was nice to know I'm not the only one who does that

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FoolThemAll

I like hearing songs I enjoy in commercials. They're getting more exposure that way. The Zutons' "Pressure Point" or the Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize", for instance. I'm glad.

And if it's something universally known, like "Dream On"? Well, hell, I'm catching a snippet of a cool song. I don't pay attention to the product being advertized, anyway, so it doesn't bother me at all.

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Coppertop

I die a little inside each time I hear the intro to Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin play in those damn car commercials.

Glory's Sun

I like the current trend of hearing Drum and Bass in commercials.. I just hope it doesn't lead to MTV takeover of the genre cuz I would be one pissed off human being

flamingdog

If you don't watch TV commercials never piss you off.

That said, I like spotting songs used in TV shows or films that I like, especially if they're a little out of the mainstream.

vanblah

Pictures of You - The Cure - HP Printers
Da Da Da - Trio - Volkswagen

Locobot

Moby was fairly obscure until he sold every song on his "play" album to advertisers. Now a lot of artists just see this as another form of marketing their music. I never thought I would hear indie rockers like Modest Mouse, Ted Leo, or Stereolab on commercials but they've all done it. I can't blame the artists, if someone wanted to give me $30K to use a song I'd already recorded I could see the appeal. Unfortunately as has been mentioned the commericals create an association that is sometimes unbreakable. It really depends on how frequent the ad is run though. Bob Seger's "Like a Rock" will forever be associated with trucks for me and I can't listen to "Exile on Main St." without thinking of burgers, it sucks.

vanblagh-thanks for reminding me of Volkswagen and Trio-they completely ruined that group for me. When I first listened to their album I bristled and had such an adverse reaction to it. PBS also uses that song.

roachboy

http://www.wordspy.com/words/earworm.asp

the new frontier in marketing....

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MacGuyver

The Cadillac commercials... nothing can compare. Cadillac and Zeppelin, Best Music-Commercial pair, EVER.

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gboz

Doesn't it seem like Bono would be against this type of thing? It felt really wrong when I saw them on that ipod commercial.

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Coppertop

I'll let Bill speak for me here:

"Here's the deal, folks. You do a commercial - you're off the artistic roll call, forever. End of story. Okay? You're another whore at the captialist gang bang and if you do a commercial, there's a price on your head. Everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink." - Bill Hicks

FoolThemAll

Funny, but as is often the case with Hicks, bullshit. It doesn't resemble prostitution in the slightest. It doesn't necessarily harm artistic integrity at all.

Oh nos!!!1 Hes macking monies off the art he made. Hes eval!!

I don't say this often, but this is one issue where I agree with Cartman.

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Coppertop

Funny how you made the jump to prostitution. The issue isn't making money off their work, you obviously missed the point.

FoolThemAll

Funny how you didn't bother to enlighten me as to what the "real" point was.

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Coppertop

It is that when artists become spokespeople for corporations the line between them, their music and the company becomes blurred. Say a band sells their song to a large multinational corporation for use in a commercial. They make some dough, the commercial is jazzed up a little, no harm no foul, right? Said band then makes a new album, and some of the tracks on the new album have a certain political/philosophical slant to them. How can you know that the message is theirs and not something the company wants them to say? It becomes difficult if not impossible to tell when the one stops and the other begins. Hence the remark about their music being suspect.

If they're only out to make money then they won't be concerned with being off the artistic roll call. What do they care? The check cleared after all. But don't expect me to respect their integrity afterwards.

There are more important things than making money. Sadly our society doesn't seem to value them too highly. Oh, we say we do, but when it comes down to it, no one bats an eye at these things.

FoolThemAll

Yeah, that's pretty much what I gathered. Hicks likened it to prostitution, at least metaphorically, by using the term 'corporate whore'.

The problem is, the above reasoning is unfair speculation. And actually kinda farfetched, the way you worded it. Because they sold usage of a song to a company, the company now might have a stranglehold on where they're going with their sound/message? The Shins might start writing pro-burger songs or the Zutons will write an inordinate number of songs about jeans?

Certainly, there are many out there that have the sole creative direction of "whatever makes me money". But then, there are also many who are quite capable of retaining their original creative directions while making some money off it in less inspired ways (like commercial spots). There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with that, and it's more than possible, it's downright feasible. If being involved with commercials makes one's music suspect, it's only because of overly suspicious people who unjustifiably assume the worst.

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Coppertop

It's a slippery slope. Sell your song to Chevy today, and tomorrow you might think twice about making a song or public statement about cars, SUVs, the oil industry or something related. I'm not saying they are directly correlated, but the potential is there and I'd prefer it if they stayed separate. Not going to happen, I know. I guess I'm just a misguided idealist.

FoolThemAll

Eh, it might be a slippery slope sometimes. But it's my perception that the majority of the cases involve musicians that begin with all intentions of slipping purposely or stand at the top with no danger of slipping. And again, I don't think that the latter group is doing anything wrong. Whatsoever.

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Halx

Ya know, forget artistic integrity for a moment. I personally hate knowing the fact that nearly everything that you lay your eyes on today is geared to sell you something. I mean, to give you an example, why do brands put their logo on the shit they sell you? They aren't like pottery makers who only put their logo on the bottom of their product, they've gotta announce it to you that THIS IS THEIR PRODUCT. I'm sitting here staring at my Mitsubishi monitor. I've got a bright blue Pepsi can next to my left hand. My Klipsch speakers.. well they're promoting THX along with them. Things are no longer just what they are.. they are what they are called. It gives ME a really uneasy feeling when I help a company that has done nothing but sell me something I needed to buy anyways sell even more.

Ya know, whenever I have a conversation about a nice salesman who I talked to, I stop and get a shiver down my spine, realizing as if I learned to have such conversations from the really shitty commercials that you see on TV.

So now listen to some Led Zep and try your hardest not to think of Cadillac. Yeah, all you can think of is a fuckin' STS burnin' rubber, can't you? It only adds to the feeling, ya know? You can't escape it.. someone has injected their product advertising into your leisure time.

So, yes, you CAN blame people for selling their art to corporations to use to associate their own products with it. It stops being art at that point.

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FoolThemAll

Why does it stop being art? That makes absolutely no sense to me.

It's art with a new (and most likely, less pleasant) association attached to it, and only for some.

Because I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't think of Cadillac when I hear Led Zep. The music overshadows the commercials the music was used in. Commercials just don't stick in my head that way. The one exception I can think of: "Like a Rock", because I've seen it for so long. (But I didn't care much for the guy's music in the first place.)

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Arroe

I hate that they used "Just What I Needed" by the Cars for the Circuit City commercials.

It just spoils great songs.

FngKestrel

alarment13

for me, it depends on what the product is for, like the cure's photographs used by hp. i like the song and it gives me a chance to hear this song when im not expecting it or have forgotten about it. but the zepplin song for cadillac, that kills me. may be it is because cadillac has adopted that song for a bunch of tv spots, not just one, this worries me to think that it could become like chevy. then again it should not be surprising, zepplin already did a song with p diddy so my view of them had already droped

Coppertop

Indeed. We all need to be good little consumers and buy shit we don't need. Great card!

Charlatan

You have to remember that some artists do this so they can get airplay.

Moby as stated above and even Sting... His song Desert Rose became a hit because it was in a car commercial.

With more consolidation in media ownership companies like Clear Channel control the play lists the nation. The chance for artists to get their songs heard is getting tougher and tougher... Licensing your music for use in tv ads and in films, is one way to circumvent radio.

One hopes that the promise Satellite Radio is that it will allow greater airplay to those artists who are being shut out of mainstream radio despite their potential for popularity.

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FngKestrel

Amen. Decentralization of power seems to be a common theme that's coming up these days, from satellite radio to TiVo to netflix. It's about putting the power back in the hands of the consumers and letting their voice decide what matters.

Stompy

I really hope you're joking because that is one of the biggest fuckups of commercials in recent history.

I can't stand Zeppelin's "Rock N Roll" anymore after that Cadillac commercial, and it pisses me off. It WAS a fine song before, but now it's not after hearing it associated with that goddamn company so often. These companies see nothing wrong with taking a song you love and just shitting all over it with their brand.

It's not right. The music doesn't always overshadow the commercial. I listened to that song millions of times over the years, and within a few weeks it was ruined because of that commercial.

Fuck Cadillac, too. I was never interested in buying their crap to begin with, but I sure as hell won't now after they pulled this stunt.

Commercials may get stuck in my head at times, but they really do have the opposite effect on me: I get so sick of the commercial that I flat out refuse to buy any product from that company. They can bombard me with crap all they want, but one day it'll probably get to the point where I start going out of my way to ruin their product..

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alansmithee

I'm suprised nobody mentioned the Wrangler jeans commercials with "Favored Son". They pretty much ignored the whole intent of the song (the disparity between rich and middle class/poor in Vietnam) and made it out to be some ultra-patriotic theme.

And I do think having your music in commercials can hurt your artistic integrity. If you aren't that well known, you risk becoming "the VW commercial guy" or something to that effect.

trickyy

seems like there are two kinds of these ads
1) artist 95% of people identify
2) artist 5% of people identify

often ads in the first category are the most annoying. see the who and lenny krappitz. it's kind of greedy on their part. and their white noise is not very appealing.

but i do like commericals with more obscure music. the "search engine" hummer ad had some really cool music...i'm not sure you can even buy it on amazon. mitsubishi also has good music at times, and amon tobin provided the tunes for bmw's x3. most people forgot about nick drake until pink moon was on that vw ad. these spots have not spoiled these artists; most people still don't know who they are. hicks can take his whiny faux punk attitude somewhere else...he is funny but the chronic complaining wears thin.


also, if you've hear xm's "unsigned" channel, prepare to be let down.
it's like artists that haven't quite made it on MTV, but sound very mainstream.
maybe sirius has better options.

and i think you mean fortunate son, yes, funny. kind of like iggy pop's song about heroin used for a cruise line.

FoolThemAll

Or an ad for birth control using a song by the on-and-off Christian band Sixpence None the Richer. The song having been done originally by the La's and relating to heroin addiction.

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sherpahigh

I agree with you for the most part. But there are plenty of shitty ads in the second catagory as well.

Good music being used for commercials gives me mixed feelings. Hearing a Zep song being used to sell cars kinda pisses me off. But it doesn't overshawdow the great music for me. Same for Nick Drake's "pink moon" still love the song.

Hearing The Warhols on some commercials didn't use to piss me off so much since I felt it would help them gain some exposure which I felt they deserved. But now it seems like every second commercial has a Warhols tune and it's starting to piss me off.

Like a Rock however is a different story, it's gone overboard. I can't hear that tune without thinking about a chevy truck. Bah.

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trickyy

yeah, for some reason i didn't like my morning jacket on a beer ad but liked the others i mentioned. i also thought the massive attack/smirnoff was kind of cool, mainly because i hadn't heard the song in a while. (forgot to mention that pink moon was likely about suicide...nice selling point for vw's.)

it's really kind of subjective, but most of the time i feel as stated above.