"Ain't singing for Pepsi, Ain't singing for Coke, I won't sing for nobody [who] makes me look like a joke," sang Neil Young a couple of decades ago. But can doing a deal with the ad-men help convince an audience that you're the Real Thing?
Music Week has fifteen minutes of video interviews with participants in last week's Music Meets Brands event: access to the article requires subscription, but non-subscribers may be able to go straight to the video.
One of the interviewees (5 mins 45 secs in) is Pete Hutchison of Peacefrog Records, who talks about how his label has sold synchronisation ('sync') licenses for their artists' music. The most famous example of this is the use of José González's recording of Heartbeats in a Sony Bravia advert that got people talking — see below.
It's widely believed that the exposure González got from this advert acted as a catalyst to project Jose into wider arena, as Hutchison puts it in the interview (Hutchison says refers 400,000 albums, possibly just in the UK, while González's site claims 700,000).
In the book, I use this story as one example of building a buzz. Developing an analogy with pollination and fertilisation, I suggest that much music has to find a 'carrier' — as bees and other insects — to help spread the word as far as possible.
Hutchison's interview is a reminder that going down the sync route is no guarantee or panacea, however, as many seeds still fall on the proverbial stony ground. Of 30 sync licences that Peacefrog has sold, only one has broken an artist.
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