This little wonder featured first in BlowBack, a sadly missed street-style publication.
Late in 2005, everyone’s favourite monobrowed monkey Noel Gallagher was spitting blood at Jack White for writing a song for Coca-Cola. "What the f**k is he playing at? He dresses like f***ing Zorro on doughnuts! What the f**k is that about? He ceases to be in the club. He's supposed to be the poster boy for the alternative way of thinking… I'm not having that, it's f***ing wrong.” A song! For Coca-Cola! Cue a great deal of hand-wringing and finger-pointing from the indie fraternity. “Sell out” was thrown about on blogs and broadsheets the world over. Principles not price, man! So far, so standard, just another easy tirade. The weird world of music licensing – when a track is allowed (licensed) to be broadcast – was made a little weirder a few weeks later. When all the dust had settled and Oasis made a quiet announcement. Their All Around The World had been sold for a AT&T ad.
There is an imagined time, somewhere before that Phat Planet Guiness ad, even before Kurt was horrified to find out Teen Spirit was a deodorant brand, when advertising was a filthy word. When no cool, alternative musician would consider letting a dirty ad man at his or her songs. When Babylon Zoo or Stiltskin could be laughed out of town for jumping on a Levis TV spot. A lot of this must be hazy nostalgia for a vaguely “realer” time, but a quick look over who’s been licensing what so far this year raises a few eyebrows. Bands on ads in 2007? They’re cool. Commercialbreaksandbeats.co.uk - an online database of music used on UK ad spots – reads like a Dazed and Confused contents page, with turns by Devandra Banhart, Black Keys, Fujia & Miyage, New Young Pony Club, Colder and Roxy Music all listed this year alone. Artists that were once spoken of in hushed, reverent tones by musos, like Vashti Bunyan or Arthur Russell, now feature on phone adverts. Most surprisingly of all, hardly anyone calls them a sell out.
Not to say that every licensed band out there are willing to drop their trousers for the next adman that calls. Far from it, these bands are reacting to – and acting in – a world that’s incredibly brand savvy. For Ayla Owen, Director of Music at Leap, the music licensing and publishing house behind Levis’ and KFC’s legendary soundtracks, “these bands are very aware of how their music is presented. Some brands are more attractive than others, but they don’t just want to know about the brand itself, they want to know about the director and the script.” This is one of the reasons that bands are happy to be used in commercials - their sheer quality. We all know that Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer and Michel Gondry started out directing adverts and we’ve all cooed over Sony’s coloured balls and paint splashes. Advertising is an established step on the trail for almost any ‘creative type,’ whether you’re a writer, a director, a musician - or indeed a music exec. This removes both the stigma of the dreaded corporate dollar and the fear that the ad might turn out a bit, well, shoddy. Abla El-Sharnouby, head of publishing at Five Missions More, a music publishing and licensing consultancy with MTV and The Beeb in their portfolio had a few words to say on the subject. “Creatives [at advertising agencies] speak the same language as musicians: they’ll want to make a cutting-edge ad with the best underground music. Even if that’s not exactly what the clients themselves want,” she laughs. Music selection is an incredible creative process in itself. Sam Reid from Hear No Evil, a Soho music consultancy could be talking about DJing when he says “it’s a very fun but subjective job. You really can’t put your finger on what makes an ideal track – some songs just fit.” Needless to say, most bands don’t have an issue with “fitting in.”
Bands aren’t selling out: they’re buying in, and are very clued up about how they’re doing this. This is the "myspace generation", after all: image is everything for a new band, and its kissing cousin self-promotion needs a tight control over how images are used. Fine for The Clash to finally reach number one on the heels of a Levis ad, with Should I Stay..., but when Joe Strummer’s image was used for a Doc Martins ad, heads rolled. Using images from photo library Corbis, ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi showed the icon in heaven wearing DMs underneath a toga – a clanger so bad it lost Saatchi the contract, and the person responsible for distributing the picture had their employment “considered.” Promotion and control are the key, but it’s got to be the right situation, the right ad and the right product. “Association with a ‘cool’ brand is great for a band, and it’s not seen as working for ‘the man’ in the same way as it might have been. Look at how many kids there are wearing Puma or Nike T-Shirts – they are essentially happily wearing an advert,” says Ayla. “It’s brand association.”
Punting your track out to an agency is more than locking onto a ‘cool’ brand – for an even vaguely alternative artist, it’s a way of contacting and connecting with a far, far wider audience than an independent or below-radar label could hope for. Abla: “a prime-time ad reaches literally millions of people, millions of people that might never come into contact with that artist. Just look at Nina Simone: thirty seconds on a Muller advert and a new Best Of is released” Whatever misgivings a listener might have about an artist’s five decade-long career being crammed into a thirty second yogurt ad, it didn’t lose her estate anything: 2006’s Very Best Of Nina Simone’s first track was Ain’t Got No, I Got A Life, and was one the year’s best sellers. While bands selling huge quantities by being “that band off that advert” is nothing new – just ask Babylon Zoo – the need for publicity is far bigger today than it ever has been, simply because it is harder to make a the same splash in the far bigger ocean. The price of launching a band in 2007 is astronomical – The Guardian set it at a cool £594,000, with each TV ad weighing in at £10,000. Abla: “we really try to promote music that wouldn’t be heard otherwise, that would be pitched otherwise. More independent, alternative, underground, whatever, artists are being featured on ads. It’s now far cheaper to feature a song by an up-and-coming artist than it was even two or three years ago, because of increased demand and there are also just so many bands out there.”
The digital revolution has provided a multitude of different places for advertisers to associate themselves with ‘cool’ bands, from viral marketing to podcasts. “There are so many avenues you could go down for entertainment,” says Abla. “Which means that people are very sophisticated about what entertainment they consume.” Ayla of Leap agrees. “I’m surprised that we haven’t seen a purely digital superstar – someone who side-stepped traditional record companies and was marketed entirely online.” The story’s subtext is the much publicised death of the record industry. June saw the closure of the country’s biggest “independent” store, Fopp, and the release of Prince’s new album, given away with every Mail on Sunday, and the ongoing nosedive of album sales. The industry is in dire straits. Advertising might just be part of the solution. Before music is declared D.O.A., let’s raise a glass for the ambulance chasers. Sell out? No sell out!
No comments:
Post a Comment