Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - I’d Like to Teach the World to Buy Edition Part 2
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4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2024
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
That damned jingle! In that infernal commercial trying to sell you cars, sneakers, soda, gum! Can’t get it out of your head? Well, what if we made it longer, had a famous singer perform it, and put it on the radio? How would you like it then?
A surprising number of hits across chart history got their start in advertisements: the Carpenters song that was originally a promo for a California bank. The ’70s country-pop smash by a character who didn’t exist, and was selling you sliced bread. The Sting song that began as a Japanese beer jingle. The Chris Brown song that sneaked a chewing-gum slogan into the chorus.
And that’s beyond all the songs and artists whose trajectories were changed by an ad placement—whether it was the R&B classics licensed to sell you Levi’s jeans or the indie-rock songs anointed by Apple to make iPod-wearing silhouettes bop.
Join Chris Molanphy as he explains how Madison Avenue finds its way into the Hot 100’s penthouse. We may think we don’t want the hard sell—but an army of Don Drapers are working day and night to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.
Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, want to hear a PC Game Pass advert? |
| 0:04.7 | I'll take your silence as a yes. |
| 0:06.6 | Want you games on day one like Call of Duty Black Op 6 or Stalker 2? |
| 0:10.5 | I thought so. |
| 0:11.8 | How about unlocking all the League of Legends champions when you link your Riot Games account? |
| 0:15.6 | All for one low monthly price. |
| 0:17.3 | Well, guess what? |
| 0:18.2 | We got you. |
| 0:19.5 | Learn more at Xbox.com slash PC Game Pass. Stalker to |
| 0:22.6 | available November 20th, 20th, 24. Game catalog varies by region and overtime. And yeah, |
| 0:27.7 | that's the end of the script. Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 0:52.0 | I'm Chris Melanthe, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of |
| 0:55.7 | Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On our last episode, we talked about the history |
| 1:02.3 | of advertising and the charts, how certain songs went from jingles to full-length radio hits, |
| 1:10.1 | from Coca-Cola's I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, |
| 1:13.5 | to a bread commercial that led to C.W. McCall's novelty hit Convoy, to Miclow Beer |
| 1:20.9 | ads that generated 80s hits for Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. We are now approaching the 21st century, and while the media |
| 1:31.0 | is debating the ethics of rock veterans selling out to Madison Avenue, a jeans company, |
| 1:37.8 | and later, a computer company, are about to supercharge how catchy ads can boost pop star careers. |
| 1:47.6 | One of the most interesting experiments in music forward advertising happened on the other side |
| 1:55.0 | of the Atlantic. |
| 1:56.4 | Starting in the late 80s, Levi's Jeans began producing ads in England that licensed prominent pop songs. |
... |
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