As a fan of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, I’m forced to watch commercials from time to time. I don’t mind, I get my content for free without paying for cable… I can stand 30 seconds of ads between segments. (Don’t push it, tho, if it gets any higher than that I’m installing Adblock again.)

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is the ad for the Miller Lite iPhone Apps. I don’t expect a major beer company to make decent iPhone apps any more than I expect them to post their commercials to YouTube. Come on, guys, I would’ve embedded your ad in this blog post to emphasize the point I’m about to make. You’re missing out on free advertising here.

Anyway, the ads are only 15 seconds long but what I notice, as always, is the music they chose for the ad. It’s a simple 2-bar riff lasting about 4 seconds and just repeated 4 times. That’s all. Sometimes I wonder how much Miller Brewing Company paid for those 2 bars. Five figures? Six? For one guitar, one bass, one drum set, and four seconds of tape?

When I sit in my studio working on new royalty-free Garage Band sessions for Tubetracks I try to come up with a high-quality, interesting song that’s at least a few minutes long. Even if a producer only wants 2 bars out of 80, it’s my hope that they’ll have a broad palette to choose from in any given song.

Heck… Miller Brewing Company can buy one of my tracks and get 40 commercials out of the deal!

July 22, 2009