Popular Music and the Marketplace

Exposing new artists and the badge of affinity

The pervasive exposure of advertising relative to the increasingly fragmented nature of “traditional” media means that commercials now serve a useful role in exposing new artists.  This is not the safe recycling an already-a-hit but often leveraging the cool brand to provide the listener with a badge of affinity (halo effect).

Apple’s use of the introduction of Chilly Gonzales’s ‘Never Stop’ is a recent example of this.

From Story Narrative to Narratives of Self—music genre as interpolation in advertising

In this section I shall get to the heart of the matter that I outlined in my introductory post.  That is “those times at which advertisers attempt to accrue a musical audience wholesale by attaching the ideology of that music to the ideology of their product, or their own morality.  The genre of music is specifically made to tell the story the advertiser intends in the hope that the diegetic sound will enter into synergy with the morality or the product of the film’s purveyor.”

I will first discuss two successful attempts at such a venture.  I will then, continuing to move backwards through time, look at a third piece of footage, one that was never released, but which I was lucky enough to come across in the course of first hand research.

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