Monday, October 29, 2007

Bruce Springsteen seen crashing Red Sox party

I have (what I think) is a fairly reasoned approach to musicians and promotion. If a corporation buys a classic song, like, say, The Beatles' "Hello, Goodbye," to use it in its commercials that's bad. The artist doesn't really need more exposure for the song, and there's something just wrong about using the borrowed interest from a song that was created for a completely different reason to point out that your store has good prices. On the other hand, it's OK with me when an artist—even an established one—agrees to have their new music used in a TV show, or commercial. Depending on the radio or MTV to sell your new CD is much, much harder than it used to be, so you've got to think about your music's distribution creatively. But I did have a problem with the use of Bruce Springsteen's "Radio Nowhere" (frame above) at the end of the World Series post-game show on Fox last night. As is customary, the network wanted to scroll several minutes worth of credits, and it chose a format where clips were shown on the right, while credits scrolled on the left. There it was—the Red Sox big moment—and instead of solely sticking to images from Major League Baseball, there were interspersed clips from the "Radio Nowhere" video. It was completely incongruous. (The video isn't embeddable, but you can see it here.) It was like Bruce was stealing time from the heroes of the moment. He had no business being there.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Fox always gets it wrong with there b-roll footage/music selections. In the past i remember Joe Buck going to commercial with Gwen Stefani's BANANA song. Give me a break.

Their producer must be an old guy who is trying to be hip but doesn't have a clue.