Dream Tropes Wiki/Repurposed Pop Song

So there's this song from your youth. Whenever you listen to it, it brings back a whole lot of good memories, and you end up going through the rest of your day with a smile.

What better tune to use to advertise a product?

Advertising is all about appealing to emotion to make a sale, and few things hold more unalloyed positive emotion than a favorite song. It's not surprising that the advertising industry very quickly seized upon the idea of buying the rights to a song and using it in an ad. The basic argument is that the good feelings the viewer has for the song will be transferred at least in part to the product, making a new customer or reinforcing an existing one.

As virtually everyone will tell you, it doesn't always work. But that doesn't keep the agencies from trying again and again.

Apparently this practice "works" often enough in the sense of selling enough of the product to make the practice economically sustainable, no matter how artistically objectionable. Spam email has to work on somebody too, right?

Repurposed Pop Songs come in several varieties:

* Played straight. Usually the most expensive option. The agency bought the rights to the specific recording that everyone knows. It's used almost untouched except possibly for a bit of editing to make it fit the length of the commercial, or to get right away to the "good bits" (i.e., the part that has relevance to the commercial's pitch).
* Cover version. The agency didn't buy (or couldn't afford) the rights to the actual recording, so instead they acquired the right to use the song itself and did their own version. Sometimes it's made as close to the original as possible; sometimes it's wildly different.
* Product-specific lyrics. An extension of the "Cover Version". The song's lyrics are rewritten to extol the virtues of the product. This can have the biggest backlash if potential customers feel the original song is somehow "cheapened" or "ruined", so this treatment is often reserved for older or more obscure music.
* You will sometimes even encounter altered versions of popular songs being used in really low-budget commercials or when they just couldn't afford the song they really wanted. (See that page for examples)
* These commercials can also have an instrumental or acoustic version of the song while a disembodied voice talks about the product/service/help line/donation.

An agency with an especially low budget (or high concept) might also do any of the above with a song from the public domain, up to and including nursery rhymes. This has much the same effect, but with fewer lawyers and a lot less money involved.

A song can also be instantly repurposed if an advertiser buys the rights before it's even released. In such cases the commercial use hits the airwaves at the same time as the original song, or sometimes before, and effectively turns it into a Celebrity Endorsement.

Repurposing a pop song can have a Broken Aesop effect if the message of the song is subtler than you'd get by listening to the loudest parts of the lyrics. For example, there is a movement to make Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" the official state song of New Jersey, despite the fact that it's about how terrible it is to live in New Jersey and how much the songwriter wanted to leave. (See Isn't It Ironic?.) Seth Stevenson has written two articles for Slateabout this.

## Examples

* PBS Kids Movies loved this trope:
	+ *Sagwa: The Movie* used "Every Day" by Stevie Nicks in both the film itself *and* in all the promotions.
	+ Trailers for *Whodunnit? A Share A Story Musical Mystery* used "East Bound and Down" by Jerry Reed, aka that song from *Smokey and the Bandit*. 'Cause kids love songs about bootlegging Coors beer east of the Mississippi River!
* Early Oyfish ads featured "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees.
* Monster Jam ads on ETVKK tend to use the song "Jumpin' Kids", the English version of one of the *Crayon Shin-chan* end themes.