The erasure of antagonisms between popular music and advertising

While the use of music in advertising dates back centuries, using popular music in advertisements was often seen as the ultimate sellout that offended aesthetic and bohemian values. By contrast, today advertisements represent one of the best opportunities for many musicians to gain access to mainstream markets. We chart this warming of relationships between music and advertising by chronicling the practices of music industry insiders and evaluating the political economy and ideological consequences of such a nominal paradigm shift. We demonstrate that the convergence of these two media is perceived to be nonproblematic and suggest that this may be an enactment of the true industrialization of culture, with important consequences for our dialectical understanding of branding.