Midnight Oil

[Powderworks] Re: Selling Out (NMOC - Long Post)

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Wed, 09 Oct 2002 14:48:03 -0400


Interesting that this topic has come up now . . . the article I have cut-and-paste below appeared in the Chicago Tribune this past Sunday.

My knee-jerk reaction is that the intermingling of music and commercials is generally not a good thing, but it isn't a black-and-white issue (David Bowie's perspective in particular seems reasonable for an artist trying to remain viable when corporate radio continues to narrow their list of "acceptable" artists).  I know of one local artist here in Chicago who sings the national anthem at sporting events probably once per month.  It is pretty much the only exposure he gets these days to an audience beyond his hardcore fans.

Regards,
John Welk

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Who sells out?
Almost everyone, it seems, as ad exposure helps rockers reach listeners and make more money
By Greg Kot
Tribune rock critic

October 6, 2002

Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun" is both a hit single and a jingle used to sell Jamaican vacations. The Counting Crows' "American Girls" simultaneously popped up on commercial radio stations and a soft-drink ad last summer. And the Clash's "London Calling" -- once a song that epitomized the British punk band's brand of "revolution rock" -- has become the soundtrack for a luxury sports-car commercial.

In a previous era, Crow, the Crows and the Clash would have been excoriated for so blatantly "selling out." Once rock bands equated selling their music to an advertiser, no matter how benign, with the crassest form of commercialism, an instant credibility buster if not a career-killer. When a few rock songs started popping up on ads in the '80s, Neil Young was so incensed he wrote "This Note's for You" about it: "Ain't singing for Pepsi, ain't singing for Coke," Young snarled, "I don't sing for nobody, makes me look like a joke."

Now Papa Roach is singing for Pepsi, and proud of it. "Time and Time Again," the second single from the California rock band's latest album is being used in an ad to promote the soft-drink manufacturer's latest invention, a berry-cola beverage. "We think this is a great, different way of getting the song out there," says singer Jacoby Shaddix in a statement trumpeting the marketing campaign. "We think these kinds of commercial and creative relationships are the wave of the future," adds Michael Ostin, principal executive of Papa Roach's DreamWorks label.

Those must be chilling words to Young. Fourteen years after "This Note's For You," he still hasn't had a song appear in a TV commercial or accepted a corporate tour sponsor, but it's clear his self-righteous stance no longer speaks for the majority of his peers -- including his old Buffalo Springfield bandmate, Steven Stills, who licensed the rights to the anti-war classic he recorded with Young, "For What It's Worth," to a beer commercial a few years ago. Young's hard-line stance has been replaced by a more ambivalent, less judgmental attitude that sees art and commerce as bedfellows rather than mortal enemies.

Of course, rock and big business have always been partners, if sometimes uneasily; recording contracts with major corporations are the foundation of the industry, beginning with Elvis Presley's $35,000 deal with RCA Records in 1955. But by the late '60s, the lines between the corporations and rock culture began hardening. Bands were signing richer recording deals than ever, but strived to separate themselves from the "straight" world of advertising and television. The punk era hardened those attitudes into us-against-them platitudes. "You were considered a sell-out if you put out a seven-inch single," Moby recalls of his days in the Northeast punk scene. It was an attitude that led Nirvana's Kurt Cobain to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in the early '90s wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed "Corporate magazines still suck," as if to acknowledge his uneasiness with any sort of connection to the world of big business.

Cobain was wrestling with a question that 10 years later is rarely even being asked. For the media world, yesterday's whores have become today's media-savvy visionaries, using the mega-bucks of the advertising industry to get their music in front of listeners who might not otherwise hear it. The major ad agencies are now stocked with rock 'n' rollers, dance-club denizens and hip-hop connoisseurs, a music-savvy business community that hears songs as hip, attention-grabbing currency.

The trend toward music in ads "is less about the bands and more about the people running these ad agencies," says Chris Martiniano, 30, creative director at Zipatoni, a promotional marketing agency. "My generation is more music savvy than the one that came before in this industry."

And the advertisers are marketing to the largest single generation of young Americans since the Baby Boom took over youth culture in the '50s and '60s. Generation Y consists of 71 million Americans born between 1977 and '84, and for them the culture is less about art vs. commerce -- the type of black-and-white dichotomy that sustained the Boomers -- and more about seeing art as just another form of commerce. To the "Y" kids, Martiniano and other ad execs say, the world of personal computers, video games, movies, music, media and advertising is a fluid and ever-changing playground of stimuli vying for their attention.

As to why Gen X (the generation between the boomers and the Ys) isn't a music marketing target, Martiniano says they are more cynical and not as easily marketed to. They're also much smaller in size as a group, so it really wasn't a factor in the advertising campaigns.

And the advertisers are marketing to the largest single generation of young Americans since the Baby Boom took over youth culture in the '50s and '60s. Generation Y consists of 71 million Americans born between 1977 and '84, and for them the culture is less about art vs. commerce -- the type of black-and-white dichotomy that sustained the Boomers -- and more about seeing art as just another form of commerce. To the "Y" kids, Martiniano and other ad execs say, the world of personal computers, video games, movies, music, media and advertising is a fluid and ever-changing playground of stimuli vying for their attention.

As to why Gen X (the generation between the boomers and the Ys) isn't a music marketing target, Martiniano says they are more cynical and not as easily marketed to. They're also much smaller in size as a group, so it really wasn't a factor in the advertising campaigns.

"If Jello Biafra did a car ad it would be an outrage to Gen X people," Martiniano says. "The Gen Y kids see brands as part of their lifestyle, where Gen X'ers are a lot more skeptical about that."

Generation Y is a generation with $1 trillion in spending power, and it has become the focal point of countless advertising campaigns, many of them built around songs. And it's only beginning. "I'm planning out my clients for 2003 in retail and general advertising, and everyone is jumping on the music bandwagon," Martiniano says. "Go through any grocery aisle and you see soda, candy, chips and they're all doing different music-related promotions: get CDs, win a trip to see No Doubt. It's gotten out of hand."

Exposing new music

New bands see the ads as a way of exposing their music at a time when commercial radio stations are playing a narrower range of music than ever before.

That's why the Chicago-based indie label Minty Fresh licensed a six-second snippet of a Papas Fritas song to an eyeglass commercial that ran during the Super Bowl and winter Olympics. The deal brought Minty Fresh and the band $15,000 -- enough to finance the making of another record on a small-budget label.

"If it's not a morally reprehensible product, a TV ad can be good for all parties," says Minty Fresh founder Jim Powers. "It can mean the difference between a band being on the road two weeks or four weeks. It can enable you to do a video. It can finance another record."Older artists find TV advertising a valuable outlet for similar reasons. Sting resuscitated his career recently by licensing his song "Desert Rose" to Jaguar, and even appeared in the ad himself -- essentially an $18.5 million commercial for Sting's latest album, which went on to become one of the biggest sellers of his post-Police career. The song became a hit at radio, but only after it connected with listeners through the TV ad.

"Selling out?" snorts Sting's manager at the time, Miles Copeland III. "We have to put that sort of thinking behind us. Labels need to be open to teaming up with people who have more money than we do to break a record, because radio sure isn't open to it."

Apparently more artists of Sting's generation are coming around to that thinking.

"I've given music to lots of commercials," David Bowie says. "I don't get radio airplay anymore, and I probably never will because I've passed that magic age. So you start thinking, what do you do to keep a profile so that people are aware you're still around and making music?"

Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders once considered TV ads a compromise: "I saw that aligning our music with a film or certainly an advert would be considered an endorsement." But now, "bands will give songs to adverts because they think that might be the only place they'll get heard. There has been a huge shift, and I've become part of it, because I believe it's better to get heard on television than not get heard at all. I'm just trying to keep my music alive."

TV's surrogate role

The consolidation of commercial radio, which has reduced the flow of new music onto the airwaves to a trickle of only the most well-financed artists, has cast the television advertising world into the role of a surrogate talent-scouting and artist-development department. Record labels now court advertisers like they once did radio programmers, in hope of landing gigs for their fledgling acts on the TV advertising circuit. Licensing fees are paid to record labels for the master recording and to publishing companies for the song rights, and artists usually get a cut of each. Each deal is different, based on exclusivity, length of use and how recognizable the song is, and fees can range from the low five figures to millions of dollars.

But artists don't always have a say in how their songs are used. Paul McCartney has seen several Beatles songs used in TV commercials, but against his will, because the Beatles publishing is owned by Sony Music and Michael Jackson. "When a song becomes [sing-songy voice] `kitchen cleanser,' it's like, awww [expletive]. What a bummer, man," McCartney says. "Maybe the younger generation doesn't feel like that, but to me it's a bit of a pity, because the Beatles stuff would do better if they didn't cheapen it."

McCartney is in a position of strength. He's one of the richest men in the world and can afford to be particular about how his music is used. But many artists can't afford to be so high-minded.

Moby became the poster child of the TV-ad movement when all 18 songs on his 1999 breakthrough album, "Play," were licensed to commercials or movies. Before that, Moby had never sold more than 50,000 albums in his decade-long career, and "Play" was being ignored by commercial radio programmers until advertising execs jumped on its coolly evocative songs and began using them as backdrops to sell everything from perfume to blue jeans. "Play" eventually went on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide.

"The role of popular music is democratic," Moby says. "I feel I have to do everything in my power to at least make what I've done available to people and then trust the wisdom of the democratic consumerist process to sort it out."

Fan's disappointment

Yet for listeners who have invested emotionally in a song, only to hear it used in a television commercial, the response is usually one of profound disillusionment. Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney was appalled to hear the Clash's punk-era classic "London Calling" used in a recent Jaguar ad. The song warns of impending nuclear doom, and became an anthem for a generation entering an era when nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed like a real possibility. Yet the Jaguar ad campaign was approved by the members of the Clash, who were paid a flat fee of less than $500,000 for the 45-day use of the song, according to advertising sources.

"I get really depressed because it takes something I looked up to, that I used as my gauge, and wipes away my respect for everything the Clash did because they were so against the thing they are now representing in that ad," Weiss says. "They weren't doing an ad for something that would make the world better for people, they were doing an ad for an elite car that no one I know can afford."

The campaign worked, at least from a commercial standpoint. Jaguar had its best sales month ever in August for its X-type model, which retails at $30,000 and higher.

"We knew the sensibility of some Clash fans would be jolted, but we figured most consumers wouldn't think about the words and meaning of the song -- they'd just remember the chorus from their youth and perceive it favorably," says Mark Scarpato, the Jaguar executive who spearheaded the ad campaign. "If it hadn't worked, it would've been back to classical music for us. This enables me to try even bolder things."

Like the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K.?"

Scarpato laughs. "You never know."