JON PARELES
ESSAY


In“Creator,”the rawest track on Santogold’s debut and self-titled album, the singer Santi White boasts,“Me I’m a creator/Thrill is to make it up/The rules I break got me a place up on the radar.”It’s a bohemian manifesto in a sound bite, brash and endearing, or at least it was for me until it showed up in a beer commercial. And a hair-gel commercial too.

It turns out that the insurgent, quirky rule breaker is just another high-paid marketer. Billboard reported that three-quarters of Santogold’s excellent album has already been licensed for commercials, video games and soundtracks, and Ms.White herself appears in advertisements, singing for sneakers. She has clearly decided that linking her music to other, mostly mercenary agendas is her most direct avenue to that“place up on the radar.”

I know - time for me to get over it. After all, this is the reality of the 21st-century music business. Selling recordings to consumers as inexpensive artworks to be appreciated for their own sake is a much-diminished enterprise now that free copies multiply across the Web.

While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Face book friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt, Website pop-up ads or a brand.

Musicians have to eat and want to be heard, and if that means accompanying someone else’s sales pitch or videogame, well, it’s a living. Why wait for album royalties to trickle in, if they ever do, when licensing fees arrive upfront as a lump sum- It’s one part of the system of copyright regulations that hasn’t been ravaged by digital distribution, and there’s little resistance from any quarters .

The question is: What happens to the music itself when the way to build a career shifts from recording songs that ordinary listeners want to buy to making music that marketers can use- That creates pressure, subtle but genuine, for music to recede: to embrace the element of vacancy that makes a good soundtrack so unobtrusive, to edit a lyric to be less specific or private, to leave blanks for the image or message the music now serves. Perhaps the song will still make that essential first impression, but it won’t be as memorable or independent.

Music always had accessory roles: a soundtrack, a jingle, a branding statement, a mating call. But for performers with a public profile, as opposed to composers for hire, the point was to draw attention to the music itself. Once they were noticed, stars could provide their own story arcs of career and music, and songs got a chance to create their own spheres. If enough people cared about the song, payoffs would come from record sales and radio play.

When Moby licensed every song on his 1999 album,“Play,”for ads and soundtracks, the move was both startling and in poor taste, but it did lead to CD sales; an album that set staticky samples of blues and gospel to dance-floor beats managed to become a million seller. Now , platinum albums are much scarcer.

For all but the biggest names - like AC/DC, which made Wal-Mart the exclusive vendor for CDs of its long-awaited“Black Ice”album, and sold more than a million copies in two weeks - a marketing deal is more likely to be its own reward rather than spawn a career. With telling ambivalence, Brooklyn Vegan, the widely read music blog, recently started a column,“This Week in Music Licensing: It’s Not Selling Out Anymore,”but soon dropped the“selling out”half of the title. There’s no longer a clear dividing line for selling out, if there ever was.

Not wanting to appear too crass, musicians insist that exposure from licensing does build the kind of interest that used to pay off in sales and/or loyalty. Hearing a song like Chris Brown’s“Forever”on the radio or in a commercial has a psychological component; someone else has already endorsed it. Musicians who don’t expect immediate mass-market radio play have gotten their music on the air by selling it to advertisers. That can help build careers, as Apple ads have done for Feist and for this year’s big beneficiary, Yael Naim, whose“New Soul”introduced the MacBook Air.

Consumers reinforce the licensers almost perversely: they pay for music as a ringtone, but not as a high-fidelity song. Perhaps it’s too 20th century to hope that music could stay exempt from multitasking, or that the constant insinuation of marketing into every moment of consciousness would stop when a song begins. But for the moment, try this: Put on a song with no commercial attachments. Turn it up. Close your eyes. And listen.

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