on 4/26/03 10:56 AM, Perfect Sound Forever at perfect-sound@furious.com wrote:
I don't know that there necessarily can be any hard and fast rules for saying 'this is good practice' or 'this is bad practice' which applies in all/most instances.
If someone disagrees and has a definitive road map for this, I'd love to see it!
Best, Jason
Believe me, if you're looking for an artistic moral compass that operates on foolproof wrong/right turf, musicians are far from your purview. I cut a lot of slack in a lot of directions, as I think most of us do. Randy Newman doing a Ford commercial is less offensive that the Clash doing a Jaguar commercial, laregly because Randy never presented himself as the only songwriter that matters, nor did he pose as anyone's moral watchdog. Zorn using his music for commercials, no problem. Radio isn;t exactly beating his door down, here's a way to get the music onto the airwaves, and to fund records by people like Mark Feldman. Devil's advocate time: Remember that a lot of the people with say in advertising-land are people born in time to have been impacted directly by punk rock, and they finally have control over advertising budgets. Instead of spending it on generic crap or even Moby (whose fan I am not, but he sure makes a decent record for that style), they want the chance to hobnob with their heroes -- Iggy, the Buzzcocks, whoever -- plus the chance to be the guy who got the Buzzcocks more money for the use of one song than they ever made off all their record royalties put together. And I don't think that's a nefarious thing on the part of the advertiser. I think it's even noble on his part. I've done gigs that cost enough money that the club had to have a corpo tie-in. Lucky Strikes cigarettes was one -- which, since that's my brand, I was fine with it. Skyy vodka, on the other hand, I wasn't really pleased with, since I don't drink (at all), and, when I still did, I didn;t care for the product. But I had musicians to pay (and ten of them, at that), and I kind of had to look the other way as to who was paying the bills. When you've got a payroll to meet, sometimes your most valued ideals (pay your band before all else) have to be enabled by backing down on the ones that practicality has a say in (who sponsors the event for the venue). sh