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Look what they’ve done to my song, ma – egregious use of much loved songs in TV ads

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While can understand bands starting out or who ain’t very successful using their better known songs to feather their pension nest, it always grates when you hear fairly successful acts/writers lining up with their hands out.

Recently heard snatches of Crimso’s 21st Century Schizoid Man in some perfume commercial on UK TV. It had apparently earlier featured on an ad for XBOX which at least seems a bit more relevant.

Worst one I can think of at the moment is the rerecording of Gold for Bold fabric conditioner – all together now “BOLD! Always believe in your goal, you’ve even got time to stroll”. Gary Kemp must be cringing with embarrassment as he starts licking his fingers and counting his ill-gotten gains.

Anyone here think of any equally atrocious crimes against good taste?

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Comments

  1. Are they necessarily the original band version?
    I recall some years ago that The Stones refused permission for Gimme Shelter to be used in an ad (for a car?).
    The advertising agency commissioned a cover version that was pretty much undistinguishable from the original.
    There was also that advert for some sort of meat based snack that used John Peel’s voice. Peel faced accusations of hypocrisy, as a vegetarian taking the money to advertise such a product.
    However it wasn’t him but an impersonator. Peel just had to live with the accusations while making nothing from the product, unable to claim any copyright to his voice.

    • Sound-alike voices on adverts are quite common on commercial radio in the UK. Hard to imagine Jeremy Clarkson would look twice at a glue commercial, Brian Blessed would stoop to backing a bookies, or that Stephen Fry would waste his time with an energy drink, but there are vocal impersonators who are earning a living doing it in their place.

    • Conversely, perhaps there is an argument that owning your own back catalogue should not necessarily allow you to do whatever the hell you want to do with it…

      After opening Live Aid, what else was there left to do apart from an ad for an Aussie supermarket chain?

      • Those AKG C414 mics have no pop shields on them, and they’re mounted straight into boom mics with no spider shock mount. Don’t these advertsing ‘experts’ know anything?

        • Indeed these ‘experts’ know zilch.
          I have written to uswitch as their theremin musician ‘plays’ the tune on the volume control of the theremin and not on the pitch control.
          Uswitch
          I have seen your television advert featuring someone ‘playing’ the theremin. I am disappointed that your theremin ‘player’ has got his polarity reversed. To play the theremin correctly the vertical aerial is the pitch (which would play the tune) and the horizontal loop is the volume.
          Can I say how shocked I was at this basic understanding of theremin technology.
          Hopefully this can be rectified.
          Yours in theremin pedantry

    • If you don’t own either the actual recording or the publishing rights, there’s very little you can do about whoever DOES own it exploiting it. I think you can block versions performed by you from being used, but unless you own the publishing rights you can’t prevent someone else recording it to sound like you, as long as they don’t change the words. Modern-day contracts can have clauses regarding use, but old-style ones didn’t.

    • Fripp and pals are credited as co-writers on Kanye’s Power, which is a song that has been in so many movies/trailers/ads in the last ten years, I hope everyone’s been able to pay a few bills with it. (The song has 17 writers overall). Whether or not Fripp et al. get any say in its use depends on the agreement that was drawn up on the sharing of publishing/use of the sample – Camp Crimson might have a veto or they might have signed it away/attributed it elsewhere.

      Here’s a fun playlist of songs that I have that sample King Crimson, you can play “Spot The Tune”:

  12. The whole purity of not having a song in an ad is all a bit antediluvian nowadays, is it not? I remember Neil Young’s This Note’s For You being the line in the sand about whether you were or weren’t cool. Are we more forgiving if a song is used in a movie, rather than an ad? I’m not completely certain about how I’d feel about my beloved Beatles becoming fodder for adverts, but it’s certainly a way of getting attention and it has worked wonders for Queen’s visibility over the years. There is only one time that a Beatles recording has been used in a commercial and it was for Nike at the end of 1987/start of 1988. In this instance Michael Jackson gave the publishing permission (to use the written song) Capitol Records gave permission (to use the recording they owned) but the Beatles did not give permission, so the ad got pulled and The Beatles sued. You could argue that it’s an effective ad that introduced the song to new people (such as me), but in 1988 it was a scandal.

    (Obviously, as publishing is out of the Beatles control, Vodafone can reach an agreement to use an anaemic cover of Come Together in an ad, just not the original recording).

    • Ive noticed Led Zeppelin have started licensing songs after years of refusing.

      Them refusing all licensing led on this deleted scene from Almost famous. Add your own stairway…

  14. For younger bands/singers, getting your song on an advert is part of a business model.

    It sounds depressing, but unless you’re Adele, you won’t earn from record sales. You could be in a situation where millions of people are streaming and loving your music, and what do you get? A few thousand quid?

  15. This was why Squeeze recorded the ‘Spot the Difference’ album. Heineken used ‘Tempted’ for a TV commercial, somebody congratulated Glenn Tilbrook on the size of the cheque he could expect, but Tilbrook knew nothing about it, and apparently had no say in how their back catalog was used.

    • Squeeze don’t make a penny from their back catalogue, I seem to recall. I’m sure I read that, essentially, they got ripped off and their back catalogue was sold to a hedge fund.

      • The ELO soundalikes that Jeff Lynne recorded are part of the same deal. AFAIK, the re-recorded ELO Greatest Hits from a few years back was a stockpile of songs Jeff had recorded to undercut Sony licensing the masters.

        Say a car company wants to pay $100,000 to licence an ELO track for an ad. Sony own the recording, Jeff’s cut is, say, $25,000. Or, Jeff records a soundalike version, licences it for $50,000 and he keeps it all.

        Curiously, when James Gunn was making Guardians of the Galaxy 2, he wanted Mr Blue Sky for the opening credits, and Jeff was blocking the use of the original 1977 recording and pushing for his re-recording. Gunn realised that no matter how good the carbon copy, it lacks some indefinable otherness that the original has, and apparently paid excessively to get Jeff to ok the 1977 version.

        • Listening to Madonna’s Into The Groove earlier it occurred to me that there might be a market for artists re-doing just the vocal tracks from stuff earlier in their career. (Artists hang around for decades now and their voices do sometimes change a lot -I only really started to like Leonard Cohen when he got gravelly). Young Madonna was compared to Minnie Mouse at the time and Steven Morrissey is very flat on that first Smiths album. Part of the appeal and heresy to even suggest it? As with movie remakes, it’s not as though the original will cease to exist..

  16. Currently Sky Mobile are using Wouldn’t It Be Nice for no other apparent reason than the title sort of fits the idea that it would be nice to change mobile provider. It annoys me probably rather more than it should.

    • It’s just lazy thinking on the part of the “creatives” at the ad agency.

      I remember about 25 years ago, someone was wondering on their blog how Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head” was selected to use in some ad campaign then doing the rounds, as it was not one of Dino’s better known tracks, and wasn’t even much of a hit. I wrote to him and pointed out that it was the first track on one of the just then-released “Ultra Lounge” collections…so the Bright Young Thing heading the campaign, casting about for some period Dino, probably figured it would fit the bill nicely without having to do any further research.

    • Are the Proclaimers in it? My vision for the ad is that they have had a viagra, which gave them the strength to walk 500 miles and then appeared at, (hopefully,) two different ladies’ doors gesturing with their eyes that all is well “down below”.

  18. No. I gather you have to search very hard to find it, as it is only visible through specific internet searches.
    As, no doubt, many a wilting bishop will have explained to disappointed actresses everywhere.

  20. Kelloggs are currently using Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plan Pour Moi to shill one of their sugar-loaded cereals. May well be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the lyric has a line saying something along the lines of “my girlfriend’s just thrown up on me”. Ooooh-ooooh-eeeeh-ooooh! as Belgium’s pop chart Poirot might have said

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