Memories For Sale

One of the most amazing things about music is the way that hearing certain songs can immediately transport you back to the first time you heard them. Not only do you remember where you were, but how you were feeling in the moment as well. I think this is one of the reasons people get so defensive when other people criticize their favorite songs or musicians. Saying you are not a fan of a group can lead to heated arguments, because some people take it as a personal attack. In fact, fans often have a tendency to get more emotional about specific songs than the people who wrote them. I'm sure part of that comes from the fact that they don't have to hear the songs every day. Some musicians have been playing the same song every day for the last 25 years of their life. (What's even weirder about it is if they don't play that song the crowd gets mad at them for skipping it.) I'm sure by now they are ready for someone else to take the song, remix it and kill it for an entire generation. Still, I would prefer they simply stop playing these songs if the alternative is allowing them to appear in commercials.

I came to this decision the other day as consecutive commercials featured songs which were once chart-toppers and a couple of my all-time favorites came on. At first I was stunned that these companies could afford the rights for this music, because these were not insignificant bands. I don't want to defame their good names (though I will in a second), you just need to know they have previously been known to sue at the drop of a hat if their music was used without permission. And by "permission" I mean a check being sent the artist's way. That was the other thing which struck me - are these musicians that hard up for money that they would sell out like this? I know that everyone has a price and when you haven't released any new music in a few years you probably will take a check from any direction, but this particular band has a large catalog of hits to choose from. They could have taken any number of b-sides and let the advertising executives butcher those. Instead they bastardized one of their biggest hits in an effort to sell mattresses. When you have a large catalog of music and don't need the money, I would think you would hold on to the largest hits until they were asked to market the best products, not take the first offer which comes along.

Look, I'm willing to concede that these musicians wrote these songs and as such they can do pretty much whatever they want with them. However, I just think that they need to take a moment and think about the long-term consequences. Like I said, a lot of times when you hear a song you can remember where you were the first time it floated into your brain. If these musicians are still active I don't think it is the best idea for their first introduction to an entire new generation who will eventually comprise their audience to be when they are trying to sell them steak knives. They will never be taken seriously after that. Also, there is a chance they will simultaneously turn away the fans who have been with them this whole time and who suddenly feel like their memories will now go hand-in-hand with some crappy ad campaign. For the musicians it might just be a check, but people don't like it when the song they used at their wedding for their first dance as man and wife is now part of a campaign to get people to buy a new refrigerator. You're messing with memories and that is never a good idea.

Of course, this whole thing comes down to a very difficult question, which is when is the time to finally sell out? It can be quite the balancing act, though I think the last few years have made it much easier. It used to be that if you were in a Super Bowl ad your career was irreparably damaged. Now not appearing in a Super Bowl ad makes agents wonder if their client has already become too obscure to appeal to a mass audience. The trick is to strike while the iron is still hot enough to get a big paycheck, but no so soon that everyone knows you only got into the business to make commercials, because that pretty much kills any serious music cred you have built up over time. If you miss that window the best you can do is hope you've crafted a song which will hang around long enough to boomerang back around into being a classic. But not too much of a classic, because then snarky bloggers such as myself will take to the internet about how you held out for this long and still somehow managed to destroy it anyway. Like I said, it can be difficult to figure out. Either way, the important lesson that many musicians need to remember is that just because they may have written a song and they may technically own the rights, once it is out there for the public to consume it is no longer just their property.