I was recently on the phone with a record company on behalf of an ad agency looking to license a recording for a major campaign. After I named the client and the agency, I waited through the 10-second holding pause, during which the visual I always have in these situations played in my head: the person I’m speaking with opens his or her desk drawer, and pulls out a black hood. He or she then reaches for an axe behind the chair, as I am held down for the customary beheading. Finally, the voice returned and told me that I must fax in an official request, but we’re probably in the vicinity of spending $350,000. Three hundred and fifty-thousand dollars—and I haven’t even called the publisher yet!
Whenever I question the high price, I frequently get the same response: "Well, you are taking the song out of the market." This has always struck me as ridiculous because ad agencies are actually doing the exact opposite—they are putting the song back into the market, with millions of dollars behind it. Millions of people will be reminded of the song, and millions more will be introduced to it.
The song does help advertise the product, but the commercial helps advertise the song, too. Perhaps we should request to see the spike in record sales during the term of the license—maybe the client should get a percentage of the spike for promoting the song? A major motion picture usually has a $20 million advertising and promotion budget that includes trailers, which advertise the song, artist and soundtrack label. Still, enormous fees are charged for music.
You could argue that the record company built up these artists to reach this level of popularity, but the argument runs out of steam in relation to hits from the past. These recordings have recouped many times over, and sell modestly as compilations and greatest hits packages. Not much is being done to promote these songs anymore, as record companies concern themselves with more current artists. So when an agency requests for an older song, it should not be met with a "let’s cash in" mentality. Hundreds of thousands of dollars is too much to charge an agency that wants to breathe new life into an old catalog piece!
I took my seven-year-old son with me to buy a new truck last month, and the dealer took us for a test drive. I turned on the radio and it was The Who’s "Bargain." My son, who had recently heard the song in a TV commercial that advertised Jeeps, smiled and yelled, "That’s so cool, Dad—the song comes with the car!" If we had been listening to The Who on my classic rock station, he would’ve classified it as "old people’s music." The commercial—not the record company—exposed the song to him, and now my son has his own copy of Who’s Next.
