

How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics - soundsop
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/09/products-placed.html

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tdavis
Who cares? Today's Pop music isn't music anyway. It's all specifically crafted
to make it extremely popular so people will buy albums for singles, listen to
the same songs 100 times on the radio, and buy tickets to overdone concerts
with half-naked women dancing and crazy lights flashing everywhere.

Britney Spear's (does she still "make music?") next hit single could be an
advertisement for Coke and I couldn't care less. In fact, I'm confident most
fans wouldn't even notice.

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unalone
Not to squabble on generic terms with you, but pop music is still music. Does
it focus on entirely different things than other genres of music? Yes. Does
that mean that you can easily dismiss it as not having any musical merit
whatsoever? Of course.

However, it takes talent to make a good pop song. It's a radically different
talent than the sort that goes into other music, but pop musicians are
talented. They're just looked down upon because their music is so lacking in
terms of depth. But that too contributes to WHY they're so popular. The
creation of pop music is a study unto itself.

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tdavis
Right, I'm not saying it doesn't take talent. Musically, though, the songs
have no merit, so I don't really consider Pop music to be music; it's more
like smart marketing or something. For instance, would you consider the songs
in Coke commercials to be... music? I mean, it's music in the dictionary sense
of the word I suppose, but nobody with any reasonable amount of taste would
call it that. It's just an advertisement.

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pmorici
Well this just exposes the musicians for the charlatans they are when they say
things like "I only want to sell my album as a whole on iTunes so as not to
sacrifice the artistic integrity."

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helveticaman
To be fair, there are a few musicians for whom this is true:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album-oriented_rock>. Led Zeppelin albums, for
instance, are worth buying in whole.

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BrandonM
I totally agree with this point. Putting together a coherent, musical album is
largely a lost art. Just listen to any old Led Zeppelin or Rush album
(particularly [ _Led Zeppelin IV_ ] and _A Farewell to Kings_ \+ _Hemispheres_
) and compare it to a modern rock album by a band like Nickelback or Papa
Roach and there is simply no comparison.

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gabrielleydon
This has been going on since the birth of the record industry. The only thing
different about the present and the past is the volume of chatter about the
subject.

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DabAsteroid
Perhaps it is different in an age of free, all-you-can-eat, high-quality
copies of commercial audio.

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zandorg
It's not in the article, but the 60s Ray Davis band Kinks had Lola (Lola...
Coca Cola).

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dazzawazza
Is any more evidence required that the music industry has no respect for it's
audience?

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swombat
Actually, while reading this article, I found myself wondering whether these
guys might have made up the email... I wouldn't put it past them, and a single
piece of evidence is a bit thin.

That said, I agree that the recording industry deserves to go out of business.
I just like to hear a little bit more supporting evidence than a single email
that a couple of activists claim they received.

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davidw
I don't know... If they're not going to make any money on distribution because
of free downloads, something like this becomes more attractive.

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DabAsteroid
Analogy:

<http://www.funatiq.com/images/david-mcdonalds-statue.jpg>

