Combatting The Mute Button

[koganbot]

I posted this on a Blackbeard Blog comment thread; the subject was Tom's commentary regarding ads on Spotify, and this was my largely off-topic analysis of an old phenomenon:

There was - to my mind - a big rise in the quality of TV commercials in the mid '80s, when, among other things, rock and other forms of popular music began to be used in the commercials. The commentary among critics tended to be "Oh, noes! Our music has been irreparably violated, everything is cross-promotion, and music as a democratic project is finished." Whereas actually what was finished were various broad associations between musical styles and social divides (class and generational). Not that music stopped being a social marker - that will never happen - but it was less a marker of Sides In The Great Battles Of The Sixties (And Seventies); hence in using rock and soul and modern pop in commercials one's risk of alienating a large segment of potential customers was now far smaller. But even more important, on a practical level, was that, given the ever-increasing ownership of remote devices for controlling the TV, the watcher could hit mute, change channels, or hit fast forward (if watching a program she'd prerecorded). Previously, advertisers had a captive audience, and their goal was to hammer their message into the consumer's brain; but they could disregard whether the viewer was having a good time during the commercial, as long as the message got embedded. Now, however, commercials had to compete almost as programming. (One of the stupider beliefs about music videos was that they were fundamentally advertising, and whoah! and woe! here was a channel, MTV, devoted to nothing but advertising. Whereas obviously, if people were watching MTV on their own volition, they were treating the music videos as programming.) Not that people turned on a regular program for the commercials, but the commercials now really had to appeal. The music was one way to make them appeal, and to combat the mute button.

Comments

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

Amazes me that for the amount of words expended over the years on the use of pop music in commercials, so few of them are devoted to evaluating the actual usage, i.e., is the song used effectively? The question is always, "is this a good or a reprehensible idea that such and such a product is using such and such a song to sell itself?" You're expected to have an answer or an opinion on this before you see whether it's been put to good use or to stupid use.

"all shakespeare is just an advert for the globe theatre"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

radio adverts in general are an irritating and an intrusive feature of radio: i think at least partly because -- unlke TV ads -- they can't avail themselves of popsongs as significant content material (or you couldn't tell where the song-programming ended and the ads began...): hence spotify uses the stars TALKING (which is lame and boring and nothing anyone wants to hear)

of course some critics of pop have always said that it's ALL just a long ad for music-hardware: the songs on the radio are "nothing but" ads for the radio itself (and latterly for appliance-led lifestyle choice: 'i like jazz because i am such-and-such a purchasing type of fellow")

so that (a) people using pop in their TV ads are piggybacking on other ad-matter, with all the problems this causes (indie rage being one of them) and (b) the evolution has gone exactly the way the "all pop is just ads for hifi" critics weren't expecting -- as if the whole of culture, ncludng its foes, has come and colonised ad-world, rather than vice versa

[koganbot]

Well, one thing I was thinking of was a Jon Savage piece from 1988 in the New Statesman ("Leave My History Alone," March '88), which hit all the bases and had lots of hyperbolic posturing: "Here is the motion of commodity culture - as ads advertise ads, in a seamless, apparently unbreakable circle." "From a business point of view, this works well and, since that is currently the sole justification for anything, very few people have questioned the violence being done to pop history." It was the violence to history he found galling, as well he might. My 1987 complaint about punk-postpunk-indie-alternative becoming PBS for the musical youth was similar, the Stooges and Jerry Lee Lewis et al. losing their force and meaning in the modern-day context of our appreciation. Recontextualization does that: it recontextualizes. But I was holding actual human beings responsible for their behavior, hardcore punks and indie kids who were nowhere close to secondary rights or profits nonetheless rendering music lame by making it their own. Whereas Savage just waved his hands at an apparently unbreakable circle. His account contains no TV viewers; to learn about mute buttons and fast-forwarding and the like, and adaptations being forced on advertisers, you had to go to Billboard. But he did pay attention to some actual use that the music was put to, and there is real pain in his account: "I deeply resent seeing songs like 'Israelites' rewritten to sell paste, or 'Da Doo Ron Ron' reinforcing class stereotypes - the black train guard, the 'Ya' braying Yuppies with their Volvo estate - because those songs were originally part of an enfranchising process. Their very success gave a voice and a face to the dispossessed; whether, in these cases, West Indians, white working-class punks or pure mavericks. Today their success is turned against them as they are reemployed to prop up an oligarchic, outmoded but highly powerful value system." I don't see why the exchange of commodities doesn't deserve any credit for the original enfranchising, since the enfranchising was part of what was being sold in the first place. But behind the hand-waving there was a cultural point, if Savage had been willing to make it: the popularity* of the music made it usable by anyone, including Yuppies, who could appropriate and change the songs to suit their own needs - just as the punk prestige that critics and word-of-mouth gave to old Stooges records brought the music to hardcore punks of the '80s, who could then dumb it down to make it suitable for their own enfranchisement. Not that everything is equal where money is concerned, but that cultural recontextualization is ongoing and it always, for ill or good, involves a change in meaning.

*The "popularity" was actually renewed popularity, since it was glamsters and punks like the Dolls and the Ramones who rehabilitated the old forgotten girl groups among the minor intelligentsia (i.e., among people like you and me, and from there to British bohemian "working class" youth, etc.), with the Clash helping to validate reggae among such minor intelligentsia and punks. Not that the music wouldn't have made it to ads in the '80s anyway, via general nostalgia, but the punks helped the process along by giving girl groups and reggae prestige.

Re: "all shakespeare is just an advert for the globe theatre"

[koganbot]

Surely the Spotify adsters can learn to do something better, a way of integrating talk and sound, perhaps. I'd think they'd have to, though if Spotify has successfully grabbed and monopolized the British streaming market, maybe they won't. (As for my own online listening, MySpace streaming has become useless for me, 'cause ever since their great changeover, MySpace's expansion of what they offer, my DSL connection can't handle them. Or maybe it's my Web browser. In any event, at least once per song the music will simply lurch to a stop for a number of seconds, then eventually resume. So I basically don't use it. Also, the way they make you look at ads - there's no interpolated sound - is to bring you to a stop after about four songs and make you click on a little x to resume the sound, so you need to go back to the page and at least for half a second look at what's there. This is also irritating, but not a deal killer. The killer is that the songs themselves don't play through, and I don't think that's deliberate, just some tech glitch that maybe only applies to me, though who knows about that.)

Re: "all shakespeare is just an advert for the globe theatre"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

notoriously trailers for some movies are way better than the movies -- they use no techniques of manufacture movies don't have to hand, but the trailers are freed from various conventions of shaping that moviemakers uneasily cling to (for what reason?)

with pop, the problem seems to be the other way round: the interesting thing really being that by far the best advertisiment for a 3minute song is the song itself: but if you play the listener the song you no longer need the advert -- what would a trailer for frankie's two tribes be? at most one of its myriad remixes -- basically it's its own trailer (and of course the montage technique which an ad could help itself to would turn the ad into a "song" of its own...)

i notice the radio-ads problem whenver i'm home at my dad's, because his carers keep the radio in the kitchen tuned to local stations all the time: i wouldn't expect shropshire to be at the forefront of innovation, but it's more like "we don't accept there's a problem in the culture: this is what radio ads have to be like*, and if you don't like that fuck off, i mean, no, wait, come back...!"

*which is clumsy, simplistic, slow, bullying, just lame compared to their surroundings...

Re: "all shakespeare is just an advert for the globe theatre"

[koganbot]

Why aren't Spotify ad spots used to promote movies? Hair replenishment regimes? Books? Is there a rule that such spots must only promote music?

Re: "all shakespeare is just an advert for the globe theatre"

[koganbot]

and of course the montage technique which an ad could help itself to would turn the ad into a "song" of its own...

And why not!

But there can be a difference. Songs are designed for multiple upon multiple listenings, but commercials need not be, so commercials can use surprise effects, talking, etc., that would lose force in a couple of weeks that songs themselves can't use.

The commercial for Frankie's "Two Tribes" could be snippets of song interspersed with outraged voices commenting on the depravity that will overtake someone who even casually listens to it. And the commercial won't be just for the song itself, but for the song plus all its commercial tie-ins: see the video on MTV (which will help underwrite the ad), buy the album, see [Film Title] that it's featured in, listen to [TV Star] endorse Frankie (and sell himself by association), etc.

Re: "all shakespeare is just an advert for the globe theatre"

[koganbot]

(Many radio commercials are local, e.g., the blowout stereo sale at Crazy Eddie's; the excitement at Club Boob & Stud, ladies in free on Tuesday; this wouldn't work for Spotify, obviously.)

Re: "all shakespeare is just an advert for the globe theatre"

[koganbot]

Listening to it, I'm struck by how much "Two Tribes" is a blues. Not a classic 12-bar, but still blues form and blues notes.

(But of course, owing to its beats etc. it's postdisco new pop rather than blues, just as "Johnny B. Goode" is rock 'n' roll not blues, etc.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Some of the boilerplate anti-commercial rhetoric that arises over commercials surely comes from the myth that they actually work. However, I think that identifying with a song you already know is likely (without having any evidence for it, of course) less likely to grab your attention than using a song you don't know. What using songs you already know and love does is put you into a consumer audience for a particular product, which is likely what people bristle against (but likewise, I bristle just as hard against bumper music on MSNBC shows or NPR segments that assume that I want a particular kind of music!).

As for actually purchasing the product, I just don't see how having a song that's already wildly popular will get people who have an investment in that song to "re-invest" in the song's pairing with the brand. I think you're more likely to attract consumers with music with which they're either vaguely familiar or completely unfamiliar. And even then it's a crapshoot -- I've found or heard several good songs through commercials, from the Volkswagen "Da Da Da" to the [insert product...Sprite?] "Si Senor" to more recently the New Young Pony Club Song "Ice Cream" that's in a commercial for [what was it again?].

But these songs serve two functions, and I'm not sure either of them are totally effective for getting me, the savvy music guy consumer, more likely to buy the product: (1) They become something more like a jingle, because you have no context except for the advertisement in which to remember them. Thinking of "Da Da Da" immediately brings me to Volkswagen only because I have no other context for enjoying it. (2) They often sell the song much more effectively than the advertisement. "Ice Cream" is a case in point -- I genuinely have no idea what the commercial, which I've seen literally dozens of times, is actually for, but I did go google the lyrics and seek out the song itself. (I'm wondering it #2 is a more recent development.)

But there are exceptions to these, e.g. what Tom wrote about the Phil Collins gorilla as music criticism in and of itself. Still, I think this is a rare use of music in a way that really highlights the music itself. Most boomer rock is plastered somewhat indiscriminately over stock car footage that yo could see in any car advertisement. The gorilla ad creates a far more song-specific link.

[koganbot]

Well, I'm assuming that the ad people have some idea of what they're doing. But as I suggested in my post (based on several Billboard articles I'd read back in the '80s), one purpose of the music was simply to get people to keep the sound on and the dial untouched, not necessarily to do the direct selling itself.

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

> > > likewise, I bristle just as hard against bumper music on MSNBC shows or NPR segments that assume that I want a particular kind of music!) < < <

Actually, I find the bumper music on MSNBC often quite witty -- a direct comment on the story just ahead or just finished. And I never get the feeling that the snippets seem directly targeted to me, or to any specific sort of MSNBC type of viewer -- the way I imagine they might to an NPR listener -- but then that might be because I have only a vague idea of who an MSNBC "type" might be. Anyway, I've been assuming for a while now that they have an actual pop fan with good musical knowledge at the switch -- "quick, we need a 10-second snippet for some footage of Palin trout fishing in Alaska" -- and I keep thinking: I want that person's job.

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

having said that, however, I admit I can't think of a single example off the top of my head of a musical bit that was particularly good, or one that lingered in the brain for more than a few seconds afterwards. they're just momentary flashes that either work or don't.

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

Not that it matters now, but I did catch a good bit on MSNBC last night. As a teaser to a story about Khadafi "setting up tent in New Jersey" they played 10 seconds of "Gimme Shelter." Which was pretty great.