As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising

Bethany Klein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317178170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The use of popular music in advertising represents one of the most pervasive mergers of cultural and commercial objectives in the modern age. Steady public response to popular music in television commercials, ranging from the celebratory to the outraged, highlights both unresolved tensions around such partnerships and the need to unpack the complex issues behind everyday media practice. Through an analysis of press coverage and interviews with musicians, music supervisors, advertising creatives, and licensing managers, As Heard on TV considers the industrial changes that have provided a foundation for the increased use of popular music in advertising, and explores the critical issues and debates surrounding media alliances that blur cultural ambitions with commercial goals. The practice of licensing popular music for advertising revisits and continues a number of themes in cultural and media studies, among them the connection between authorship and ownership in popular music, the legitimization of advertising as art, industrial transformations in radio and music, the role of music in branding, and the restructuring of meaning that results from commercial exploitation of popular music. As Heard on TV addresses these topics by exploring cases involving artists from the Beatles to the Shins and various dominant corporations of the last half-century. As one example within a wider debate about the role of commerce in the production of culture, the use of popular music in advertising provides an entry point through which a range of practices can be understood and interrogated. This book attends to the relationship between popular culture and corporate power in its complicated variation: at times mutually beneficial and playfully suspicious of constructed boundaries, and at others conceived in strain and symbolic of the triumph of hypercommercialism.

Chapter 1
As Heard on TV: The Marriage of Popular Music and Advertising

Art versus Commerce, Revisited

The presence of popular music in television commercials continues to be met with concern from fans, critics, and musicians worried about the meaning of “selling-out” and the potential consequences of tearing down the wall, however porous and poorly defined, between artistic and commercial interests. Even as individuals who formerly opposed the practice have started to relent and reconsider the practice on a case-by-case basis, most people would not want their favorite song used to sell a product or service. The protectiveness with which popular music as a popular art is guarded can be understood as a result of the combination of the ambiguity of art-ness as an attribute and the upward battle that popular music, as a form that relies on mass-production, -distribution and -consumption, has faced in being legitimated as art. The use of popular music in advertising thus engages with old debates about the status of popular music as art, the status of art as commodity, and the tensions between artistic and commercial endeavors.

The disapproval with which popular music in advertising is sometimes met seems like a classic result of art and commerce clashing, yet popular music’s position within this debate is complicated. Firstly, there is the question of how relevant this dichotomy is for any discussion of culture; I recognize the distinctions between art and commerce as flexible and subject to the whims of other cultural changes. I also recognize that both popular music and advertising are shaped by cultural and commercial objectives, that both are cultural-commercial hybrids: commerce makes art possible, just as art encourages commerce. I therefore do not refer to the division as a stable reality, but as a social construction; “the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity” (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 60). The continuing employment of the culture versus commerce construct both inside and outside of art worlds speaks to our shared cultural values regarding the definition and autonomy of art, and the explicit impingement of corporate interest on artistic realms. What we experience as reality is created through our shared and shifting understandings. Accordingly, that the division between culture and commerce is constructed does not make it any less significant as an indicative and useful analytical tool for studying popular music, advertising, or interactions between the two.

Secondly, there remains the question of how mass-produced popular culture fits into the construction; the belief expressed by critics that popular music can be corrupted by commercial intent relies on the assertion that popular music, though situated within a commercial realm, is, or derives from, art. Insofar as other popular arts, including film and television, are distinguished from the fine arts by possessing mass media qualities, the tensions present in the popular music world reflect larger tensions at work in the production of culture more generally.

Before popular music could attempt to engage in a battle with commercialism, popular culture had to engage in a battle with high art over status. While popular culture has always in a sense been taken seriously, if only for the potential harm it may cause to society, it has followed a long and arduous path in its quest to be taken seriously from an aesthetic perspective. Modern public debates, such as those initiated by groups like the Parents Music Resource Center, continue to echo much earlier arguments about the detrimental effects of popular culture. Contemporary critiques of popular culture still draw on the same presumptions that propelled detractors in previous eras.

One of the earliest attacks on material popular culture came from F.R. and Q.D. Leavis who, along with their followers, bemoaned the presumed negative effects of mass-produced and mass-consumed media. Reacting to the cultural crisis of the 1930s, the Leavisites adopted Matthew Arnold’s mid-nineteenth-century “Culture and Civilization” claim that culture has always been in minority keeping and that the refusal of the masses to submit to the authority of the intellectual and cultural elite would inevitably lead to chaos. Where Arnold railed against the working-class lived culture of post-industrial Britain, the Leavisites directed their ire towards mass media, including popular film and advertising.

In the same period, the Frankfurt School, whose settlement in the United States spurred numerous treatises concerned with the drug-like nature of popular culture, worried that the consumption of popular culture by “cultural dupes” would lead to a blind submission to authority and, ultimately, a fascist state. From popular culture’s inception, the qualities associated with the form—its mass-production and -consumption, its commodity status, its tendency towards standardization— were associated with passive consumers, uncultured and easily influenced zombies. Theodor Adorno singled out popular music, in particular, for falling far short of the standards set by serious music. To Adorno, the “fundamental characteristic of popular music” is standardization, such that “the composition hears for the listener” (1990/1941: 302). Further, various groups and genres in popular music are only pseudo-individualized. Consumers believe they are making a choice between one band and another, or one type of music and another, but really popular music is little more than a “multiple-choice questionnaire” (1990: 306); the choices are limited, and the ramifications of choosing one over another are few.

In the post-World War II years, elites began to accept that popular culture was here to stay. The right wing of the mass culture war relaxed, confident that an anarchic uprising was not imminent, and the left wing threw up its arms—and, in some cases, moved out of the United States—convinced that submission to totalitarianism was inevitable. Attention turned from the political and social impact of popular culture on its consumers to popular culture’s impact on high culture. Dwight Macdonald’s critique of masscult, later redirected towards midcult—the “debased, trivial culture” (1983: 71) that masquerades as high art while maintaining all the unpleasant qualities of mass culture—exemplifies the fear that popular culture will suck the life out of and eventually destroy high culture. Through the 1940s and 1950s, literary figures and art critics continued to carp about the debasement of high culture in the popular realm.

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham is generally recognized as legitimating popular culture as a site of academic study, yet its founding members held an ambivalent attitude towards popular culture. Although scholars associated with the Centre emphasized the active agency of the audience, they did not necessarily champion the popular culture consumed by the audience. If anything, the Birmingham School began as a restrained celebration of popular culture. For instance, Richard Hoggart (1957), one of the earliest supporters of working-class culture, was hardly a fan of the American rock music being disseminated by the milk-bar nickelodeons. As Hall and Whannel’s (1964) assessment of the popular arts concluded, although some examples within a popular form possess culturally and aesthetically valuable traits, not all cases of the form are of equal quality by the criterion of art-ness. On the topic of music, Hall and Whannel’s proposal meant moving from the conventional aesthetic position, which ranked classical music as clearly more aesthetically valuable than pop music, to a comparatively progressive position where jazz became the category understood to be clearly more valuable than pop music.

Within the realm of popular music, distinctions are consistently made between more and less artistic genres, often around variables already involved in the discourses of cultural difference, such as race, gender, and class. In the 1960s, as “rock musicians drew on artistic ideology to legitimize and make sense of their movement,” black music was excluded from the definition of art as “selfconsciously thought” by its classification as “body music”: natural, rhythmic, good for dancing (Frith 1981: 20-21). On the one hand, a genre like blues is seen as “too natural to be art” and, on the other, less “natural” genres, including 1960s soul and later disco, are often subject to the opposite accusation that they are “too artificial” (Frith 1981: 21).

Likewise, the assessment of popular music as art has also been bound up with assumptions about gender. Not only are female musicians perceived as generally less artistic than male musicians, but male musicians with mainly female audiences are also positioned lower in the popular music hierarchy. This distinction is partly because rock, often considered the authentic to pop’s inauthentic, is maledominated. Female musicians are pressured into blandness and “have rarely been able to make their own musical versions of the oppositional rebellious hard edges that male rock can embody” (Frith and McRobbie 1990: 377).

The role of class in the assessment of art-ness was identified by Gans, who expected “Bob Dylan to be more popular with ‘higher’ taste publics; an action oriented ‘belter’ like the late Janis Joplin, with ‘lower’ publics” (1999: 124). Similar to the distinction around race, the implication is that true art comes from the mind; that which comes from the heart or soul fails to meet this criterion. Action-oriented belters are perhaps more closely aligned with folk art than with the high arts. Hall and Whannel’s suggestion that in evaluating popular culture distinctions must be made within the category—a proposition that has played out around race, gender, and class, among other categories of analysis—indicates that at least some forms of popular culture transitioned from being a challenge to “real” art to being considered art themselves.

In his attempt to define literature, Eagleton wrote that “one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing … than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing” (1983: 9). Likewise, the shift from mere entertainment to art that popular music, and other popular arts, experienced can be identified less through internal qualities than through the presence of related activities and classificatory practices. The treatment of a cultural form by external institutions, such as the academy and the press, can be used as a measure of the form’s placement in the arts hierarchy. Baumann (2001) argued that the American film industry underwent a shift from entertainment to art as a result of a number of key factors, including the establishment of competitive film festivals, ties to universities, the transition from studio- to director-centered production, and the intellectualizing discourse of critics. Popular music has benefited from many of the same factors: there are prizes awarded to popular musicians, such as the Grammys and the Mercury Prize, university departments and academic journals devoted to the subject, and popular music critics employed by newspapers and magazines the world over. Similar to the studio-to-director shift in film, the shift from performing standards and other musicians’ compositions to writing one’s own material marks an artistic shift in a musician’s career, and it is a criterion used to distinguish popular musicians as artists from popular musicians as entertainers (recall the Beatles’ transition from entertaining moptops to artistic visionaries).

In the high arts, not every work will meet the demands of the art world’s shared aesthetic standards. A work can be accused of being inauthentic, commercial, unoriginal, or simply bad; even Adorno admitted that there is “bad serious music which may be as rigid and mechanical as popular music” (1990: 304). But at least there exist shared, if constantly changing, aesthetic standards against which judgments are passed. The category of popular music does not adhere to a single set of aesthetic values. To be sure, many of Adorno’s critiques of popular music—its standardization, its pre-digested nature—continue to be articulated as critiques against charting groups. In addition, even among popular music genres where aesthetic values such as authenticity are prized, not all have the same relationship to commercialism that rock does and, consequently, commercial entanglements are not necessarily strained. Certainly authenticity is a salient characteristic of hiphop discourse, but tends to be tied more to street credibility than to commercial affiliation; “keeping it real” does not preclude partnerships with sneaker or beverage companies. Qualities present in some types of popular music—acquiescence to market trends, easy entry into commercial relationships—are thus carried around as baggage by musicians opposed to those same traits. That varying and sometimes oppositional philosophies co-exist under the broad banner of “popular music” is a reminder that, like other examples of popular culture, the category of popular music is both fluid and internally contradictory, which presents an obstacle to the creation of and devotion to rules that might assert popular music more clearly as art. Because commercial affiliation and corporate sponsorship are difficult issues to negotiate for some artists but free of tension for others, there is no consistent rule by which the use of popular music in advertising can be judged.

One reason why popular music that considers itself art becomes easily conflated with popular music that has no such ambitions is that both involve similar, if not identical, modes of production, distribution, and consumption. The most artistic popular music and the most commercial popular music circulate in the same form and system. The form of popular music is an intrinsic obstacle to its artistic legitimation; like other mass-produced and -distributed media, the sheer magnitude of the form can seem counter to art-ness, where the “aura” of uniqueness once dominated as an aesthetic standard (Benjamin 1968). By 1900, the age of mechanical reproduction problematized the concept of the aura and rendered uniqueness no longer a requisite standard of art. With reproducibility accepted as a characteristic of new arts such as photography, the stage was set for other reproducible forms to enter the art world. However, even as the aura faded, the concern over whether art was pure (art for art’s sake) persisted. In creative form, popular music had siblings in the legitimated art world, but in function it stood out as commodity.

Being denied artistic legitimation in part because of popular music’s status as commodity creates the false impression that “real” art in capitalist democracies resides somehow outside of market commodification. This is hardly the case. As Becker pointed out, the popular arts are not alone in being treated as commodities: “Many, but not all, societies treat art as a commodity which can be bought and sold like any other commodity” (1982: 167). In the United States, there is no art that is produced and consumed outside of the commodity system: “popular culture is distributed by profit-seeking firms that try to maximize the audience, but then so is much of high culture, at least in America, where government subsidies and rich patrons are few” (Gans 1999: 31). Though the arts are created within a commodity system, not all commodities begin life equally; there is a “clash between the commodity status of art and the status of commodities” (Bogart 1995: 8). For the popular arts, entrenched as they are in a commercial system, value tends to be assessed in terms of profitability. As Caves (2000) highlighted, the economist’s view of cultural output as mere commodity fails to take into account the “art for art’s sake” property of creative work.

Production is not the only stage that unites aesthetically diverse types of popular music; all varieties also share distribution and consumption practices, albeit to different degrees. Compact discs are produced in part to be played on radio, often commercial, and music videos are created to be played on commercial television. While most musicians may never receive exposure by either medium, few, if any, would object to being played on the grounds that it is a commercial system. That is, even though some musicians adopt a stance of anti-commercialism with relation to the creative process of music-making, functioning within an intrinsically commercial system is not seen as a contradiction. In terms of distribution, too, both ends of the popular music spectrum receive similar treatment, sold through offline and online record stores, be they large chains or small independents. Ultimately, aesthetic and philosophical differences within the category of popular music can get lost behind the seeming monolith presented by shared modes of production, distribution, and consumption.

While it is true that not every musical performer adheres to the same artistic standards and boundaries, measured by its related practices, the popular music industry as a whole has achieved the shift “from a form of entertainment to a cultural genre that could properly be appreciated as art” (Baumann 2001: 404). With this shift comes the opportunity for individuals involved in the production and consumption of popular music to participate in the debates surrounding associations between popular music and advertising. When it comes to the use of music in advertising, old divides resurface in a way that differentiates popular music from classical music. Classical music is viewed as clearly being degraded by commercial interest, while the impact on popular music is less clear.

The tension between artists and advertisers existed in the fine art world long before the popular arts were recognized as potentially subject to similar artistic standards. The position that popular musicians find themselves in today was occupied at the turn of the twentieth century by fine artists who hoped to attain visibility and financial stability through illustrating print advertisements; charges of commercialism soon followed (Bogart 1995). “Commercial arts,” explained Becker, “use more or less the same skills and materials as fine arts but deliberately put them to uses no one regards as artistic, uses which find their meaning and justification in a world organized around some activity other than art” (1982: 296).

In the case of popular music licensing, Becker’s definition of the commercial arts becomes complicated. Commercial use was probably not what the artist intended at creation, but the introduction of popular music into a world organized around commerce can eclipse the originally intended use. The concern being expressed by “sell out” discourse is that commercial affiliation might devalue as mere commerce what fans and musicians believe to be art. Despite popular music’s different intentional origin, its relatively new relationship to advertising nonetheless mirrors the long-standing tension between fine art and advertising, “a century of uncertain courtship between artist and advertiser,” in which artists are “eager to enter the agency, make a fast buck, and depart with independence intact” (Lears 1987: 133). Similarly, negative responses to the practice of song licensing in advertising parallel early-twentieth-century critiques of commercial art wherein “many observers perceived the forces of commerce to be adversely affecting the intents and practices of artists and to be encroaching inappropriately into realms of experience once deemed private” (Bogart 1995: 4).

Since the popular arts are already considered in many ways “commercial”—because they are openly distributed in commodified forms and through commercial media industries—as opposed to the high arts, popular artists are always already involved in the creation of work that is both cultural and commercial. As a consequence, popular artists must remain aware of the decisions that could result in being perceived as excessively commercial. By situating themselves in opposition to commerce’s goals and activities, even while reaping commerce’s rewards, popular musicians can stake a claim to artistic integrity.

As Frith put it, “The belief in a continuing struggle between music and commerce is the core of rock ideology” (1981: 41). Because popular music is promoted as an art, the music industry has an interest in preserving this ideology. To compensate for popular music’s position within a commercial system, commodity culture and capitalism are sometimes stridently scorned by musicians for fundamentally valuing the bottom-line over aesthetics. Stratton argued that the economic structure of the music industry “requires the apparent conflict between art and capitalism for its preservation” (1983: 153). For Stratton, a reliance on an ideology of art allows consumers to see beyond the commodity form of records. He asserted that the “distancing of the music from its originator, the artist, is a matter not only of its assumption of commodity form but also one of societal positioning. The music is not only commodified; in the process it is also distanced, alienated, from the artist, and becomes an object which is understood to exist in its own right” (Stratton 1983: 148). Romantic ideology distracts consumers from the process of commodification, and the record company’s success is tied to its ability to achieve this connection between artist and consumer. The connection between artist and consumer is by no means steady and impervious to harm; the life that popular music leads, particularly as it is appropriated within other media, can be a reminder of popular music’s non-aesthetic properties, such as its willingness to adapt to external commercial settings.

Popular music has long been adopted for use within art and entertainment settings, such as film, television, and sports events, and recycled within popular music itself. Frith considered the relationship between popular music and other industries: “Individual consumption is not records’ only fate as commodities; they are also used as the ‘inputs’ for other media. This is most obviously true for radio … but even when the media are not so closely joined, the record industry can be a means to further profits” (1981: 127). The institutional settings that adopt popular music in order to sell services and products provide one of the current battlegrounds on which the struggle between cultural and commercial interests takes place. Grossberg recognized neo-conservatism as the most insidious attack on rock for the way it “celebrates (at least certain forms of) rock, but only by significantly reconstructing its very meanings and significance” (1992: 7). The use of popular music in advertising presents similarly discomfiting situations, in which the embrace of music presents the risk of transmogrification: the musical text “is modified when its use radically changes in ways that the original author could never have imagined” (Tota 2001: 116).

Acknowledging the integration of rock into the mainstream as paradoxical to contemporary attacks on rock, Grossberg wrote that rock “is omnipresent (providing the background music for advertising, television, films and even shopping). And it is not only the classics or oldies but contemporary songs and sounds that are used. Whether or not it has become ‘establishment culture,’ it does seem that rock is losing its power to encapsulate and articulate resistance and opposition” (1992: 9). What...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 As Heard on TV: The Marriage of Popular Music and Advertising
• 2 selling Revolution: The Role of Authorship in Music Licensing
• 3 commercial Art: Advertising as an Artistic Vehicle for Music Placement
• 4 “The New Radio”: Music Licensing as a Response to Industry Woe
• 5 In Perfect Harmony: Popular Music and Cola Advertising
• 6 Taming Rebellion: Advertising’s Control over Meaning
• 7 Negotiating the Future of Popular Music in Advertising
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index