This Music Brought To You By…

posted in: Music News • Rock

Last week, Blink-182 devised a pretty clever way to engage their fans and promote their newest single “Up All Night”. Instead of releasing their own video for the first single from the upcoming album Neighborhoods, Blink searched the Internet for the best unauthorized fan videos that used their music, then compiled them to create a masterpiece. With toilet paper, skateboard tricks, brief claymation and kids playing brooms for guitars in a men’s restroom, the vid clearly bears Mark, Tom and Travis’s goofy sense of humor. But the band wasn’t alone as they scoured YouTube to find the best fan-made clips. As they reveal in the video’s intro, the gang partnered with AT&T to create “The Blink-182 Film Festival You Didn’t Know You Entered.”

Yes, it’s time we add music to the list of happenings, including sporting events and television premiers, that will forever be brought to you by some giant corporation. It’s evident on numerous 2011 tours”Kanye West‘s G.O.O.D. Music imprint put together a nine-date tour sponsored by Heineken, T-Swift‘s Speak Now world tour is brought to you by Covergirl and BlackBerry sponsored the Foo Fighters‘ Garage Tour.

Now, this is not a new phenomenon. Earth, Wind, and Fire were promoting Panasonic in way back in 1979, and Pepsi paid $5 million to sponsor the Jackson‘s 1984 Victory Tour, an unprecedented amount of money at the time. And, Warped Tour has always been the Vans Warped Tour. It just seems that today, every facet of music is sponsored by someone. From the names of summer tours to the rampant product placement in Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video, sometimes it feels like the music and the sponsors are becoming one. Sometimes they actually are, as we saw when Weezer recorded a full-length version of the State Farm jingle after the insurance company sponsored their Memories tour. (You can watch it below, but do so at your own risk. It might make you physically ill to hear the group who sang “El Scorcho” whoring themselves out like this.)

All things considered, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that bands and companies are joining forces so frequently” it really is a win-win situation. Accusations of “selling out” aside, with advertisers losing revenue thanks to commercial-zapping gadgets like TiVo and musicians losing revenue thanks to the illegal downloading wonderland that is the Internet, everyone could use a bit of additional exposure. So even though you can actually feel a little (okay, a huge) piece of your soul dying when you listen to Rivers singing about the benefits of State Farm insurance, at least the company is also ensuring longevity for some awesome musicians. We think.