How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics | Hacker News Reader

How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics

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22 pointssoundsop16 comments

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.

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.

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.

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."

Because all musicians are One.

I didn't use the word "all"

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

One word: indie.

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.

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.

Analogy:

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

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