‘Do mess with Mister In-Between!’

Abstract

Broadly speaking, analysis of television advertising music is usually focused on one or the other of two general types, original advertising music or pre-existing music. This reflects disciplinary dichotomies, where musicology and interpretative disciplines in general pursue textual analysis of original musical material while political economy analyses strategies towards copyright and licensing of existing music within the field of advertising and the cultural industries as a whole. This article tries to bridge this disciplinary gap by focusing on a hybrid category: advertising musical covers. Our aim is to demonstrate and discuss how communication and promotional strategies, economic lures and artistic wills all blend together in the musical arrangement of advertising covers. The focus on these ’in-betweens’ affords an analysis of musical rationalization in advertising composition, which can be linked to socioeconomic strategies to be found within the field.