I’d Like to Teach the World to Buy Edition Part 2

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2024

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ 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. Disclosure in Podcast Description: A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. As of 9/26/24, the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across the Bond Account is greater than 6%. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See https://public.com/disclosures/bond-account to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Is crypto perfect?
0:01.9	Nope.
0:02.7	But neither was email when it was invented in 1972.
0:06.0	And yet today, we send 347 billion emails every single day.
0:12.1	Crypto is no different.
0:13.5	It's new.
0:14.2	But like email, it's also revolutionary.
0:17.6	With Crackin, it's easy to start your crypto journey with 24-7 support when you need it.
0:22.6	Go to crackin.com and see what crypto can be. Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all the money you invest.
0:27.3	This is a high-risk investment, and youate magazine, about the hits from coast to coast.
0:51.9	I'm Chris Melanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of
0:55.6	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
1:30.9	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.
1:56.3	Starting in the late 80s, Levi's Jeans began producing ads in England that licensed prominent pop songs.
2:05.7	At first, the campaign leaned on old rock and R&B songs.
	...

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