We've all watched a car commercial just to end up wondering, "What's that hip-sounding song they're playing as that Audi zooms through mountains and valleys?" Now, there's a radio station composed solely of songs that have been in TV commercials.
Slacker Radio, the online radio station, now has a "TV Commercial Station" which "features all of the songs that are currently featured in major advertising campaigns, and additional songs from iconic advertisements over the years." The station consists of about 175 songs and is updated weekly. According to Mediapost, car and liquor ads provide the most fodder for the station.
"Music supervisors are a much more reliable source for new music discovery than commercial radio or any other traditional media outlet," Mat Bates, senior radio program manager at Slacker, told Mediapost. "The idea behind this station is to showcase the work of those music supervisors and to help Slacker listeners engage with music that might have otherwise gone unidentified."
TV commercials are also where many musicians go when they want to be considered sell-outs by their indie brethren, a phenomenon crystallized by "The Colbert Report" segment when the Black Keys and Vampire Weekend competed in a Sellout-Off where each band listed off the many, many commercials each of their songs had been used in. Of course, this also means that sometimes, the songs used are hilariously at odds with the message of the ads themselves.
The station includes everything from "Second Chance" by Peter, Bjorn and John (Bud Light) to "Love" by Matt White (McDonalds) to recognizable TV commercial classics like "Days Go By" by Dirty Vegas (Mitsubishi), though it doesn't identify what commercials the songs come from. The overall result feels more like a college radio station than a corporate outpost, though of course, every song you're listening to was used at some point to try to sell something.
Slacker also just announced that it would be integrated into Ford cars through the auto company's Sync system -- which means you could end up listening to a song from a Ford commercial while driving a Ford.