Selling out is so ’90s – it’s time to put Australian music in your ads
20 years ago, the iPod launched onto Planet Earth with a song written by a teenager locked in the bathroom of a Melbourne bungalow.
The song was Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet, and its Motown meets Iggy Pop stomp is still inexorably linked with those neon-backed silhouettes on the iPod ad in the minds of millions of people.
Jet was, at that time, a largely unknown quantity, so the band was paid a relative pittance for the use of its music. No matter – Apple launched the iPod, Jet sold 4 million copies of their debut album, and everybody won.
Well, in a way. After all, with the release of that catchy, colourful advertisement, and the product it launched in pockets worldwide, Apple changed the face of music consumption forever. Arguably, it was for the worse. So, actually, many people lost.
And ironically, the iPod’s devaluing of recorded music has led directly to a problem that Apple and Jet’s example can help solve.
Australian musicians can’t afford to live at the moment. So why not use Australian music in Australian advertisements, seeing you were going to use some music anyway?
That’s ARIA’s pitch, and last year they established a special award that celebrates the best use of Australian music in Australian advertisements, in order to “create a little bit of an incentive”, as ARIA chief Annabelle Herd told Mumbrella earlier this year.
Herd also rightly pointed out that “in the TV world, we talk a lot about the importance of Australian content, and it is super important that as a whole media, we continue to get Australian stories to Australian audiences”.
This year, on top of the awards, ARIA is asking advertising agencies to sign a pledge declaring they will use Australian music in their commercials.
Here’s the wording of the pledge, which I believe needs to be signed in blood.
“Our agency pledges support for homegrown music by elevating our work with local voices, sounds and stories, and encouraging our creatives to invest music budgets into homegrown artists.”
The wording is important. “By elevating our work with local voices, sounds and stories.” It doesn’t suggest you’d be doing anything charitable or compromising your vision by using Australian works. Rather, you’d be elevating your work. The fact that you’d be providing much needed income to Australian artists is merely a nice byproduct.
So, how ’bout it?
It’s no secret Australian music is in commercial decline. The sudden collapse of the music festival scene, where dozens of once thriving festivals were suddenly financially unviable, can be blamed on a perfect storm of biblical events: pandemics, bushfires, floods, and the rising insurance costs that come with each wave of bad luck.
The Australian Festival Association have said that last year insurance premiums tripled, plus inflation added a 30% rise in supplier costs, which was swiftly followed by six more interest rate rises.
Last year, James Young, the owner of Melbourne pubs Cherry Bar and Yah Yah’s — both vital and popular live music venues — told A Current Affair that insurance at Cherry Bar jumped from $400 a week in 2022, to $2,500 each week in 2023, while Yah Yah’s leaped from $600 to $3,500. He estimated that insurance hikes alone would push 30% of live music venues in Australia to close.
Australia is also a uniquely challenged territory for touring, aside from the prohibitive public liability costs, and competing with pokies (NSW has the dubious boast of the most poker machines per capita in the entire universe), we’re also way too spread out.
As Ben Lee recently pointed out, there “something crazy about the Australian music industry”, and unique to local musicians trying to make money touring.
“The idea laid out is that you’re meant to get bigger and bigger, and play bigger and bigger venues,” Lee said.
“But the cap on the population means that once you get to the size of playing like the Enmore Theatre in Sydney [cap: 1,600] you can do that once a year, because there’s just not enough people to support playing to 1-2,000 people, multiple times a year.
“So, what’s ironic is artists work hard growing and growing and growing, to get to the point where they can only play six to seven gigs a year in Australia, and that just seems insane.
“Nobody gets into our industry to do less work. We like our work, we’re artists.”
Another reason artists are very keen to see their songs in commercials. They like their work. And they’ll love to be paid for it. But geography works against this.
Speaking of Ben Lee, remember when COVID hit and suddenly his 2005 song, We’re All In This Together, briefly became the global pandemic anthem, even though that same album had the more suitable Catch My Disease on it?
Well, suddenly industry super funds – who had been using the tune on its commercials for years – were zeitgeisting off the back of its early support.
They cleverly and quickly launched a commercial during the height of the pandemic in which someone is literally watching an old industry super funds ad with that song in it on a laptop, before turning to the camera and pointing out how timely that song has suddenly become. It was the ad equivalent of “I got into Nirvana before Smells Like Teen Spirit”, but they were right to gloat and take every advantage of their luck in locking down the song of the moment.
Because, as Lee’s unintentional pandemic anthem was playing or referenced a zillion times a day, part of everyone’s brain was thinking about those annoying industry super funds hand-shape ads. That could be your advertisement we are subliminally recalling and getting annoyed at!
So, musicians are looking for every income stream and promotional opportunity they can, of which advertising neatly provides both.
But this is also a rare moment in the psyche of a young musician, during which the canny advertising industry can take full advantage. Namely: kids don’t care about selling out anymore.
Remember ‘selling out’? It was once a looming concern for every serious young artist. Now, they don’t care at all.
The idea of a young musician ‘selling out’ by allowing a corporation to use its music for its marketing has slowly fallen out of favour since the ’90s, and hasn’t yet swung back around into fashion.
Speaking broad strokes here, the hippies of the 1960s rejected the suburban sprawl, censored safety, and job security of the 1950s, and preached anti-consumerism before the 1970s and 1980s stomped it out with fax machines, Levi jeans, and soft drinks; the Gen Xers of the early ’90s were appalled by the commercialism of the 1980s and therefore pledged to never ‘sell out’, a nebulous catch-all that spurned all artistic compromise but especially artistic compromise for something as tacky as money.
And to sell your music so that somebody else could sell sneakers, was to sell your soul. That The Beatles’ Revolution, a song about well, revolution, was on a 1987 Nike commercial was seen as the nadir, the cautionary tale of the previous decade’s decadence.
But nobody cares about that stuff anymore. This won’t last, though. Trends are cyclical, and rebelling against the status quo is a time-honoured trend, especially for the target markets that advertising most desires to reach. So, it’s gotta be around the corner, right? The great rebellion. Even the mathematics works. 1960s, 1990s, 2020s – seems we’re overdue for a wave of kids who will never sell out to the man, man.
In fact, listen to those grungy guitars on those Olivia Rodrigo songs the kids are listening to. Oh, no. Next will be ripped jeans, and then a theoretical rejection of consumer culture, and then teenagers will start reading No Logo by Naomi Klein, and musicians and music fans alike will deem selling a song to a commercial to be anathema, and you’ll be forced to compose your own advertising jingles which will sound like a Nokia ringtone having a fit because, after all, that was the last time you attempted to compose anything musical. There’s already a member of blink-182 ensconced in the Kardashian house, and that’s where modern branding was born – maybe it’s too late!!
But until that day comes and your ads are stripped of sound like some Dr Seuss story, 2024 should be treated as a rare lucky blip in time for advertisers, when the following things line up neatly:
a) the concept of ‘selling out’ is not (yet) on the radar of popular young musicians.
b) these popular young artists cannot make a living from recorded music (See: previous column about Spotify)
and,
c) the entire live industry — that’s all the music festivals and merch desks and pub shows with ticket prices creeping towards $100 — that swept in and helped fill the financial gap left by physical recorded music, is now gone.
So, you have limited time to act. Get some Australian music on your Australian ad before selling out is back out of fashion.
And sign up to the blood oath here.
Enjoy your weekend.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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I get Ben Lee’s point about touring. But also many artists snub regional centres and stick to smaller cap city venues. As a former radio programmer for regional markets, smaller towns go nuts when somebody tours there because it happens so infrequently. Sure, taking a full band might be cost-prohibitive, but can it be acoustic? Can you use backing tracks? Could the road trip be an opportunity to shoot a or several music videos?
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