Popular Incentives in Music

SOURCE: Music Ally

     The economic principle I’m exploring is “People generally respond to incentives in predictable ways” My research question to help me study the economic principle is “What incentives do music advertisements offer?”
   
     The article published in Econsultancy titled “Science of Sound: How Music Makes Advertising More Memorable” demonstrates this economic principle by showing that the popularity of a song gives people an incentive to buy their product, product placement plays a large role in the music industry, and music helps people remember products more.

     First, when advertisers decide to include music in an advertisement, sometimes they’ll stray towards including a popular song in their ad. By using popular songs, the advertisers create an incentive for viewers to pay closer attention. One example of this can be found in Microsoft’s “Start Me Up Ad”, which includes, “the iconic and instantly recognizable Rolling Stones song of the same name.” Microsoft specifically chose to include this song because of its immense popularity.

     Second, product placement has a very strong influence over the music industry. By placing products into the lyrics of popular artists, another incentive is created to listen to the “advertisement”. In some cases, the public isn’t even aware that they’re listening to an advertisement. For example, in 2003 McDonald’s “enlisted the Neptunes to produce, and Justin Timberlake to record its new song ‘I’m Lovin’ It’”. Despite the fact that the song shared the same name as the classic McDonald’s slogan, it was released into the public without them knowing there were ties between the song and McDonald’s. This takes incentivizing a step further, because the public has an incentive to listen to Timberlake’s song due to its popularity, and people aren’t turned away from it because they don’t know it’s an ad.

     Third, these incentives drive a better memory of the product. When a person actually wants to listen to an ad(possibly due to popular song choice), they are much more likely to remember it. In a study by Neurosight, they proved that ads with music are much more likely to be encoded into your long term memory. Combined with incentivizing, music proves to be extremely important in advertisements today.

     In my next blog post I will research the question: What role does product placement hold in music lyrics?