Sunday, April 29, 2012

Music and Advertising

Recently, it is more dificult to find a commercial without music in the background, and the partnership between advertisement and musician has been becoming more important.
Quite honesly,  I had never asked myself why it was so important, because it was so natural to me to have a commercial with the famous musician's music. However, if I re-think about it, this is a very effective and successful partnership for both advertisements and musicians because they help each other to make profits very well.

First of all, the musicians including songwriter and music publisher get paid from advertsing agency to give the right to use the music. According to this site, "Licensing Hit Songs For Advertisng Commercials" (http://www.ascap.com/Home/Music-Career/articles-advice/ascapcorner/corner14.aspx), fees paid to the songwriter and music publisher can range from over $1,000,000 for a major advertisements and product to $10,000 for the smaller or local campaign.The important thing to note here is that copyright ownership of the song will never be lost for the musicans. It will stay with the musicans, which means that it will never be transferred to the advertising agency. Therefore, this is a very good way to get paid for the musicians, because they only gain without losing anything.

Secondly, according to Hurton (1989), there are 6 basic ways in which music can contriibute to an effective broadcast advertisments:1) entertainment, 2)structure/continuity, 3)memorability 4) lyrical language 5)targeting, and 6)authorty establishing. (http://csml.som.ohio-state.edu/Huron/Publications/huron.advertising.text.html). Because of these factors, music helps advertisments to be more effective, and it becomes more approaching to the audeinces. Music helps to stuck the advertisements in our head, and that is what advertising agencies want. If the music is catchy and get attention from the audiences, it automatically leads to the audences' attention to the advertisements and its products. 

Finally, the commericals are advertisements of music as well. It's always possible that people get to know and become more intersted in the songs by watching the advertisements. People listen to the part of the song in the advertisement, start searching about the song, and possibly buy the song. This leads to make even more profit for the musicians.

Especially recently, the information about both advertisments and songs spreaded very fast and easily by use of technology. For example, this website "Best Ad Song of 2010" (http://adage.com/article/special-report-the-book-of-tens-2010/ad-songs-2010-vampire-weekend-black-sheep/147593/) features both the songs and commercials from 2010. People can get to know about what songs were used in which commercial at the same time, this kind of information is very helpful for both musicians and advertising agencies. Additionally, because it is possible to watch and update video more easily on the internet recently, both musicans and advertising agencies get "free advertising" by the audiences if they get passonate fans

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