Name That Tune: The Importance of Putting Song Lyrics on the Internet
More and more these days, the music of independent unsigned music artists is integrated into our daily lives. Creative music licensing. It’s pretty much everywhere – on TV, obviously on the radio (online and traditional formats), at the gas pump, in department stores, grocery stores, the list goes on and on.
Thanks to insomnia, just in one day while flipping through channels I heard a few of our friend’s bands on TV (which will remain the most popular vehicle for song placements for quite some time to come) as I attempted to clear out my DVR’s recordings.
This was a few months ago, and I’d initially planned to publish this post at that time (if you can believe it, that was back in January) after having had a similar encounter with an all too familiar soundtrack comprised of more friend’s bands which included: Spider Problem’s “Cha, Cha” on some “Gossip Girl” teaser, Bang Sugar Bang’s “Where’s the Fun in That?” on a re-run of “The Hills” (I think it was a re-run I hadn’t seen that show in eons?), and of course with Samsung having gone the way of Sprint with featuring a local LA band late last year, (The Happy Hollows) on their Google Phone Commercial (Sprint featured iO Echo on their Palm Pre commercial). Just because the programming isn’t quality (but then again, I’m also not necessarily the target market of the shows mentioned), that doesn’t mean the music getting played isn’t and people won’t take notice of it.
I’m sure there was a lot more that I didn’t catch. In fact a couple of years ago I couldn’t watch many of the shows on TV without hearing a band I knew on shows. This will only become more and more true for years to come. Some of those that I recall included, but aren’t limited to: The New Fidelity, Silver Needle, Bang Sugar Bang, The Mulhollands, The Waking Hours, and The Automatic Music Explosion all on the WB and MTV, Get Set Go on Grey’s Anatomy (they even made the soundtrack)– those are just some I can think of off the top of my head, the list goes on and on. I won’t even get started on films.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but songs have a tendency to stick in my head. Name of song and artist not always so much. At least not at first listen, unless I happen to know them personally or it’s all over the place (an example from earlier in the year, Phoenix’s “Listomania”). At times all I can remember is a few of the lyrics, and those lyrics won’t get out of my head. I want to hear them again.
So what do I do?
Hope that episode plays again and they announce the artist name and song title? (more…)