The Sounds of Capitalism by Timothy D. Taylor

Author:Timothy D. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

What’s-his-name painted the Sistine Chapel not because he was a religious nut but because that was his job. I don’t understand the concept of selling out.

—Lance Jensen, co-owner of Modernista!, 2001

Marketers are increasingly becoming the Medicis of music.

—Stuart Elliott, New York Times, 2009

8

Conquering (the) Culture

The Changing Shape of the Cultural Industries in the 1990s and After

Introduction

While popular musicians had been involved with the advertising industry for decades before the 1980s, because of the effect of MTV and the popularity of portable stereo units such as the Sony Walkman, released in the United States in 1980, the use of music in advertising was on the rise in the mid-1980s, including the use of music with known musicians, as the previous chapter examined. One advertising agency executive said that nearly all of his agency’s commercials contained music in the mid-1980s, whereas just five years previously, only about half of its commercials had music.1 So much music was employed for advertising that in the late 1980s, Advertising Age’s resident critic Bob Garfield complained about the music having become ubiquitous in commercials: “It is now one of the five elements: earth, water, wind, fire and jingle.” Claiming that 90 percent of commercials featured music, Garfield said that the result was a “terrible cacophony, with a half-dozen competing melodies diluting the impact of any single one.” Garfield predicted that some commercials would eschew music altogether only to cut through the clutter, but he advocated a middle road of choosing music that was totally integrated into the commercial.2

The rise of the use of music in the 1980s meant that in this period there were increasing signs of the growing closeness of the music and advertising industries. A creative supervisor at the advertising agency Muller Jordan Weiss said, “There’s a real meeting of minds between people in the recording industry and the advertising business now. Advertising people and record people talk the same musical language. More and more, I think the two groups are going to become interchangeable.”3 One author noted the number of popular musicians who had been heard in commercials (Sammy Davis Jr., Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra); songwriters such as Richard Adler and Sammy Cahn; and pop/rock stars such as Barry Manilow, Paul Williams, and Melissa Manchester.4 As composer Billy Davis said in 1984, “Music and advertising are coming closer and closer together. But both sides can do a lot more to help each other communicate a more meaningful message on life.”5

Some in the industry were beginning to speak increasingly of commercials as recordings in their own right. Gerry Dolezar of Radio Kings, a company that promoted musicians for commercial use, said in 1985:

I want to get to the point in commercials when bands are listening to my commercials and saying, “Man, did you hear that drum sound? Did you hear how they did this? Did you hear how they did that?” Recording artists are realizing that it’s not only doing a bit of music and making a living but trying new things to bring to the record business, or vice versa.

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