IndieSongwriter.net

For the modern musician, getting your song placed in an advert or TV show can make a career. Today I read two articles about how this might affect the type of song that is composed.

David Kusek asks:

How soon will it be before musicians, perhaps unconsciously, start conceiving songs as potential television spots, or energy jolts during video games, or ringtones? Which came first, Madonna’s “Hung Up” or the cellphone ad?

Jon Pareles For the Herald Tribune, says:

The old, often legitimate accusation against labels was that they sold entire albums with only one good song or two. Now there’s an incentive for a song to have only 30 seconds of good stuff. It’s already happening: Chris Brown’s hit “Forever” is wrapped around a jingle for chewing gum.

Apparently there’s no going back, structurally, to paying musicians to record music for its own sake.

Now I’m no music business expert, so I’ve not the authority to talk about the pros and cons of licensing your music or how to go about it (anyone with ideas about that, feel free to pass on some ideas or links in the comments)

What I will talk about is the affect this may or may not have on songwriting.

Ethics and Authenticity

Jon Pareles makes a distinction between the composer, whos job it is to record whatever the advert maker might want, and the performer. For the performer ‘the point was to draw attention to the music itself’. From both articles you get the impression that there is something mildly unethical about composing pop songs for commercial purposes, rather than to express the artists beliefs, opinions or creativity.

I don’t agree, pop musicians have never been about the music itself. The music is a means to an end.

Pareles quotes some rebelious lyrics from one of Santogold’s songs and suggests that is hyprocritical to allow the song to be used in an advert. To do so moves the song from ‘endearing’ to ‘mercenary’.

If you were supposed to treat the words in such music as an essay or manifesto, this might make sense, but that isn’t how pop music works. The reason so many pop songs have had bad or downright nonsensical words is that the meaning is conveyed through other means. The beat, the instrumentation the tempo, the genre, the clothes worn, the visual aspects. All of these are just as important.

There has never been a time when the music business has done anything other than make as much money as possible. It has always done so by using music as an advert to sell a lifestyle choice, a position, a stance. The lyrics can be about rebellion, or love, but the song could mean ‘I look and talk like this kind of person’, ‘I am a modern young man/woman,’ for example.

The problem I think, is that Jon Pareles has spent a lifetime buying the ‘musician as artist’ product, discovered that some musicians he thought were artists are in fact selling a product he doesn’t like, and decided this means something is changing.

I’m not trying to say placing your song in an advert is always a good idea. If you are selling yourself as a rebelious free spirit, it might be a bad idea to wind up adertising Nike trainers. But as soon as I clicked through to Santogold’s myspace profile, I knew she was a commercial musician, not a tortured artist type. I didn’t need to hear the lyrics to understand the meaning.

30 seconds of Good Stuff

Songwright is about songwriting ideas, and I think there are plenty to be taken from these advert orientated songs. Here are a couple:

Sometimes you only need background – a melody and/or vocal line can distract when the music is only an accompaniment

Sometimes you need melody – a melody or melodic hook to stick in the brain and stay with the listener

It pays to sound familiar – A few innovative ads aside, most advert music sounds excessivly familiar. What genre are you writing in? Are you sticking to it exactly? Does your music sound like something well known?

What do you think? Any more ideas for advert music? Are you still convinced that the very notion of writing for the advert is ‘selling out’?