Selling Out to Stay In

A couple months ago the British rock band Radiohead made musical history when they became the first group to release their album independently and for whatever price their fans wanted to pay for it. While no official numbers have been released by the band, it has been estimated that they made more with this process then they would have had they gone through a record company. Although it seems to have paid off, many speculated on why the band had made such a risky decision in the first place.

In the year 2007 48% of teens didn’t purchase a single CD. With illegal downloading and so many new back channels to get music without paying for it, artists are losing enormous amounts of money and are now faced with the dilemma of how to literally, stay in business. This is where advertising comes in. It has always been a debate between the musical and commercial industries where the line can be drawn between selling out and making money.

While many artists are resisting this switch into corporate America others are embracing and flourishing off it. Everyone remembers the Britney Spears Pepsi commercials from a couple years ago. Common was recently featured in a GAP ad and there have been many more. The most recent example comes from the Yael Naim the Israeli artist whom no one had heard of until a little company named Apple decided to feature her single on an ad which then skyrocketed the song to number nine of the Billboard Top 100 and debuted with over 135,000 downloads.

So my question is, is this a good change or a bad one? While there can’t be a right answer to that question being that it is opinion based, it raises some serious issues for us as advertisers and as music listeners. While on one hand we have an exploding new medium on which we can develop our brands on, but on the other we may be changing the face of music. Is “selling out” something we should see as the saving grace for the dying music industry and a new playing for field for our line of work, or is it the turn from one of the last parts of our culture that corporate America hasn’t corrupted yet?