Tedium - Sell Out With Me, Oh Yeah 🏈

Five examples of artists “selling out” that didn’t really feel like selling out

1. John Mayer helping to promote GarageBand with Steve Jobs. At the time GarageBand first came out in 2004, Mayer was just two albums into a long, varied career that would eventually see him become both a watch influencer and a member of Dead & Company, the modern continuation of The Grateful Dead. Mayer was a hot commodity at the time, and perhaps for that reason, Apple brought him out to demo the music creation tool that is perhaps the most famous default app ever created that isn’t Notepad or Paint. Mayer was sincere on his feelings on GarageBand, so much so that he honored the event on its 15th anniversary in 2019, calling the free app “a kind of altruism on Steve’s part.” Mayer should just be happy Apple didn’t put one of his albums on an iPhone.

2. Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock” being used in Chevy ads. Seger, who lost out on a chance to turn “Downtown Train” into a megahit in the early ’90s, nonetheless found ways to make an imprint on American culture, none better than his decision to offer up “Like a Rock” to Chevrolet starting in 1991; the campaign ran 13 years, and while it was a bit aggressive, Seger liked the message it sent regarding his hometown. “[W]hen Chevy asked for it, for a long time I turned it down, because I just didn’t want it to be in an ad,” Seger said in a 2019 podcast interview. “I’m really glad I did it now, because it sold a lot of trucks to save a lot of jobs, and, you know, this is my home state. So it’s a good thing. And people keep hearing it, so that’s great!”

3. Moby’s Play. The whole album. I think it can be argued that artists who make selling out their entire brand became in vogue in the late ’90s. (Think about the groundbreaking work Diddy did on this front.) One of the best examples of this is likely Moby, who realized that if he made an album of moody electronic tunes with elements of vintage blues sampled in, the result would be appealing to advertisers. By syncing every song on the album, he transcended the sell-out to simply look like a clever businessman. Plus, it helped the album itself succeed—although some still bristle at Moby’s clever play, the average listener does not.

4. Red Bull Music Academy. Launched in 1998 and shuttered in 2019, this musical workshop and lecture series found a way to thread the needle between promoting energy drinks and actually helping to build culture around numerous types of music. When the academy shuttered, it led to a wide outcry among those in the know—a clear sign that the company had completely transcended the “selling out” concept entirely.

5. Sarah McLachlan big-upping the ASPCA. If you’re offering your music’s advertising services to a charitable nonprofit, you are by default not selling out, though it may certainly change how people think of your music, which is definitely one takeaway from the ASPCA’s use of McLachlan’s “Angel” to highlight the plight of neglected animals. The ad was an absolutely massive boon for the nonprofit, raising $30 million in its first two years in action, though McLachlan says she can’t even watch the ads now. “I can’t watch them! It kills me,” she said in 2016.

I think the key point here is that supporting advertising is not by default bad for music. Sure, it raises questions about the artist’s integrity, but as of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes pointed out long ago, it’s not like most of the artists who inspired modern musicians were afraid of commercial influence, anyway.

If it is presented in a clever way and more introductory or fitting with the artist’s vibe, it can make a lot of sense.

My favorite example of this is the 2005 ad for Sony’s Bravia TV sets, which prominently feature the music of folk artist José González. The advertisers came up with a clever idea—250,000 colorful bouncing balls, bouncing through the streets of San Francisco, a concept that gave the commercial a visual power, especially because it was synced up with an absolutely perfect song.

González covered “Heartbeats,” a song by The Knife that had blown up in indie circles, but not to the point where most people had heard it. So the song felt new and the presentation felt new. The result is that the profile of both González and The Knife rose significantly in the year after the commercial saw release.

A lot of modern ad music is honestly like this, and people don’t bat an eye, because advertisers are often cognizant of the fact that the use has to benefit the artist or they won’t do it.

The problem is, sometimes an ad that clearly does not make sense occasionally gets out. I don’t know how much money the NFL or NBC paid Beck to make an elaborate comment on how old Tom Brady is. (Mind you, Beck himself is significantly older than Brady.) But it most assuredly was not enough.

It feels like an artist who does not do this much was teamed with an advertiser who does not do this much, and together, they created something really questionable and artistically suspect to make a strangely specific message that will be irrelevant in two weeks.

That is not the formula to success in marketing.

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