The Apple-fication of Music

by cari | March 2008

About existing music used in advertising:

It used to be that the songs were repurposed with different lyrics (Devo
“Whip It”) or that you wished you could hear the song without thinking of
the stupid advertising campaign, or that the advertising agency had just never heard of music that you liked (Iggy Pop “Lust for Life”, Modest Mouse
“Gravity Rides Everything”, The Cure “Pictures of You”). This also has to do with agencies aiming for my generation and therefore co-opting its musical tastes.

Now I’ve noticed what I think of as the “Apple-fication” of music because it started with the iPod campaign. Apple, in addition to its impeccable design sensibility, boasts a formidable feel for advertising in terms of look, sound and tone. The difference between Apple ads and other ads is that they don’t just pick a catchy song or listen to the chorus and decide that
because of keywords it’s relevant to their product. They have military
precision when it comes to picking the whole package feel they are trying to convey.

So the re-imagined iPod campaign features Feist’s “One Two Three Four″ which is an
incredibly strong song off of an incredibly solid album. Advertisers are
masters at the musical edit, but with Apple ads, there is this savvy
distillation of an interesting song: the bits you hear sound amazing and,
seamlessly fitted together, feel somehow complete in their own way. This is
fine if the snippet is great and the whole song is great, as is the case
with Feist.

The Apple-fication part really comes in with something like Rhapsody’s ad
featuring Sara Bareilles’ “Love Song”. In the ad, she sounds like a
poor-man’s Regina Spektor (i.e. good) with a really clean sound. The song
bit she plays sounds fantastic. The album version of the song is far less
impressive, if nothing else, because it isn’t so nice and clean nor so
neatly distilled. It’s not horrible, but it pales in comparison to the ad
version.

Then in the Rhapsody ad, she plays the beginning of “Bottle It Up”…except
that’s not the beginning, it’s the chorus. And the whole song isn’t nearly
as enticing as the snippet. But oh wait, actually it doesn’t sound very much
like the album version of this song at all. This is made worse by Rhapsody
including the track name as part of the ad. So this is like a mystery
version of the song that is unavailable on the album named in the ad. Thanks
for that!

I can only hope that Rhapsody’s ads are so oddly deceptive because they have
unreleased versions of Sara Bareilles’ albums that sound as good as the ad
because the real albums I’ve heard are quite disappointing. So, instead of a
distillation, we have a complete fabrication. I would rather sit and listen
to the Rhapsody ads over and over, than the songs or albums from whence the
music allegedly came.

So, has it come to music sounding better as 30 second distillations or to
people happily subjecting the world to horribly butchered ring tones of
music that was crappy to begin with? I don’t see any end in sight. At least
I have come out of my playlist/shuffle madness and resolved to listen to
whole albums again, in proper track order, out of respect to the musicians
who made them.

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