Your fav songs in TV commercials: Good or Bad?

It happens almost every week now. I hear one of my favorite songs in a TV commercial. Even some of my more obsure favs that people in my circle only know about because of me. When you have spent a lifetime acquiring and nurturing a music collection like I have, no doubt many of your songs will be somewhat obscure because they were not commercially successful. This is something all collectors of anything take pride in. We live for finding those precious little gems that no one knows about. This is often the very reaon we are considered experts. And then one day you're watching the Superbowl and all of a sudden one of your babies is featured in a frickin' Nike commercial and the whole room full of people says, "That's a great song. Who is that?"

Now the whole country has heard ‘your' song and a few Google clicks later everyone knows the song. A few iTunes clicks later and the whole country owns the song. Just like that your wonderful obscure gem is now as popular as Madonna and everyone thinks they are a discriminating collector of fine music. For those of us that take great pride in our music collections, this phenomenon definitely requires some coping skills. I just haven't decided yet if this is a good or bad thing.

The specific example I mention above is the song "List of Demands" by Saul Williams which was featured in a Nike campaign this year. Honestly the commercials were first rate and the song was an outstanding choice for the spots. You could even say the song totally made the spots. But still, I have been a huge fan of Saul Williams and this song for a long time. Saul Williams' music is a super original form of Hip Hop that is hard not to like. When I play the song at parties everyone asks who it is. I first heard Saul Williams in 2002 when he opened for Michael Franti at the Paradise in Boston. The Paradise is a sweet live music venue. (If I ever find out you went to Boston and didn't check it out, I will be seriously pissed.). So I've been a fan of Saul Williams since then. ‘List of Demands' dropped later in 2004. No it was never played on the radio as far as I know so you have to be a pretty avid music fan to ever run across it.

Another great song I have heard in many commercials in the last couple years is, ‘This Is The Day' by a group called The The. This song is not as quite as obscure but The The is definitely not a household name. The song was recently in an M&M's campaign and some others before that that I can't remember. Believe it or not this song was released in 1983. The song is very catchy and upbeat and unfortunately perfect for something playfully insignificant like M&M's. So what was relatively unknown and cherished mostly by dedicated music enthusiasts is now in almost as many iPods as there are people who eat M&M's.

When people hear these songs they simply do a search with the key phrase, ‘Song in M&Ms commercial'. This yields 167,000 search results. There are countless sites and blogs that will immediately answer this question. It turns out there are entire websites dedicated to nothing but helping you identify songs you just heard in a TV commercial. They have names like, WhatsThatCalled.com, AdTunes.com, Clipland.com. I'll admit I have searched a few myself. I heard a nice electronic ambient type song recently in a Lexus commercial and it turns out the song isn't even released yet but Lexus has already bought the rights to it! However, when I search it on iTunes I discovered an awesome group with a similar sound called Lali Puna from Germany I think.

So back to my question: Is this good or bad? Music has been a very capital and profit driven business in the U.S. for a long time so there's really no point in complaining about companies using music to make a profit. Also if more quality music gets exposed through TV commercials I guess that's a good thing. Sure we can talk about artists selling out and profit driving the art world, etc, etc but those are all cliche's that are no longer interesting to anyone. Broadcasting a song over the airwaves on a TV commercial is really no different than a song being played on a for profit radio station. It gets harder every year for some of us to impress our friends with our ability to find great obscure music but we'll get over it. The important thing is the music is out there for more to enjoy. So what if it took Nike and M&M's to make that happen? Possibly they're doing a better job than the U.S. radio industry ever did.