The Changing Shape of the Culture Industry; or, How Did Electronica Music Get into Television Commercials?
Abstract
This article examines the recent changes in the culture industry and demographics that permitted a formerly underground music to enter the mainstream. The demographic shift concerns the group that Pierre Bourdieu calls the “new petite bourgeoisie,” which in the 1980s began to use the music of their youth in commercials, signaling the beginning of the end of the commercial jingle, as well as the stigma that once attached to musicians who permitted their music be in advertising. But the yuppie baby boom generation that inhabited the new petite bourgeoisie has been succeeded by a younger group in the advertising industry, whose representatives are helping to bring underground electronic popular musics to mass audiences in television commercials. Automobile manufacturers in particular have gravitated toward this music.
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1.
1. 2002 RIAA figures put “electronic” music in the “Other” category, which is about 8.1 percent of all recordings and includes many genres; they also note that their category “R&B/Urban,” which accounted for 11.2 percent of all sales, includes “dance” and “disco”(Recording Industry Association of America 2002). By 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available as of this writing, the “Other” category still contained electronica and was 8.5 percent of all sales (Recording Industry Association of America 2005a).
2.
2. Clear Channel claims that there has been an increase in diversity of radio formats—kinds of programs—but a 2002 study by the Future of Music Coalition revealed that there is as much as a 76 percent overlap in playlists between radio formats (Eliscu 2003; see also Leeds 2001).
3.
3. There is also an existing “legal payola” system. It has long been illegal for radio labels to reward radio stations for playing their songs, so an industry of intermediaries known as “indies” performs this function. Major labels hire indies to represent their interests to radio stations. Money is exchanged for “promotional support”—giveaways, free tickets, etc.—but not directly between radio stations and labels (Boehlert 2001a; see also Boehlert 2001b, 2001c; Doerksen 2003; and Kot 2002b).
4.
4. Licensing has received a good deal of coverage in both the trade and mainstream presses (see Alsop 1985; Boehlert 1998, 1999; Block 2003; Diaz 2003; Farhi 1998; Forkan 1985; Goldman 1997; Hatfield 2003b; Kaplan 2003; Levine 2003; McLaren 1998; Pate 1984; Vanderbilt 2002; Wall 1986; and Wilson 1999).
5.
5. Moby was at the vanguard of licensing; some reports say that the tracks on his 1999 album Play have been licensed up to 600 times (Lawson 2001. See also Smith 2002; Wiener 2001).
6.
6. In some ways this might seem counter-intuitive in this computer age— electronica would seem the best music to sell computers. Computers, however, are usually advertised for how they will enhance human relationships through communication, sharing music, images, videos. Their cutting-edge technology is not thematized unless there is some new development that the advertiser feels should be trumpeted.
7.
7. This is the commercial used to advertise the Cabrio in 1999, available at http:// www.hvwc.net/movies.
8.
8. Liner notes from Street Mix, Volume 1, 2001.
9.
9. http://www.vw.com/musicpillar/listen.htm; uppercase in original. This URL is no longer active.
10.
10. For more on Neill and Automotive, see http://www.benneill.com.
11.
11. The video for this song, available from http://mammoth.go.com/wiseguys/, shows DJ Touche shuffling through his vinyl collection which generates “real” musicians executing what is sampled in his track.
12.
12. See Lears 1994 for a discussion of high art techniques used in advertising in the past. Composers' ideas were less used in advertising music, though most people were probably introduced to new music technologies in advertising (see Pinch and Trocco 2002).
13.
13. It's not just that the advertising industry is controlled by young people; it is quite ageist. Richard Sennett writes in his book on work that, in the New York City advertising agency where one of his interlocutors worked, “Everything in the office focused on the immediate moment, on what was just about to break, on getting ahead of the curve; eyes glaze over in the image business when someone begins a sentence `One thing I've learned is that . . . '” (Sennett 1998, 79—80). One advertising executive acknowledges this orientation, telling a researcher that “If you're in advertising, you're dead after thirty. Age is a killer. . . .” “Flexibility equal youth, rigidity equals age,” Sennett concludes (Sennett 1998, 93).
14.
14. I should make clear, however, that there is a distinct difference in the advertising world between the “creative” and the “business” sides. The creative side produces ads, the business side manages clients and accounts. Judging from my interviews, the creative side is much more populated by people in this group described by Bourdieu; the business side seems to be populated by people who enter the field with less cultural and educational capital.
15.
15. Nick Gadsby, a British-based market researcher, has discovered that today's consumers want to “control the agenda” (Gadsby 2003, 38). Interestingly, Gadsby singles out contemporary electronica music as a new kind of “brand”—or perhaps “b(r)and”—naming the British band Aphex Twin as a group that commands the loyalty of underground fans—famously sensitive to questions of selling out, unlike the mainstream groups I have been describing—even as it permits its music to be used for commercial purposes.
16.
16. An article in Adweek in 1985 noted the “deep-rooted suspicion of the corporate sell” possessed by baby boomers, which the use of music from the 1960s was meant to circumvent (Robins and Reece 1985, M.M. 20). Some baby boomers were appalled by the use of licensed music. A particularly notorious ad was Nike's use in 1987 of the Beatles' “Revolution,” largely seen as one of the most influential acts of licensing. As a response to this and other uses of 1960s music, Neil Young wrote an antiadvertising song called “This Note's for You” in 1988.
17.
17. See, for just two examples, Lee 1993 and Holt 2000.
18.
18. For more on this Dirty Vegas song, see Halliday 2002; Paoletta 2002, 44; Sanneh 2002, E2; and Walker 2002.
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