I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the new course I recently released in collaboration with singer/songwriter Cathy Heller, “Six Figure Music Licensing In Ads & Commercials”. The question I’ve been getting asked the most is what kinds of songs work best in the context of commercials and ads. Although there’s a variety of styles and themes that work for commercials, and Cathy and I break this down at length in our course, there are some generalizations that can be made.
In general, songs that are upbeat and positive tend to work best for commercials and ads. If you think about it, this makes total sense. If you’re a company creating an ad to promote your product, would you want music that evokes emotions like sadness and melancholy, or would you want to create a positive mood using upbeat music, so that listeners associate positive emotions with your brand or product? Of course you would want to
do the latter. You would want to create a positive emotion in the viewer so that they associate positive emotions with your brand.
Most ads use songs that are upbeat, fun and quirky. If you start listening to music that’s used in commercials you’ll see that this is almost always the case. There are exceptions to this of course, but according to Cathy, about 90% of the time, music
in ads is upbeat and positive. In terms of subject matter, themes like friendship, coming home, change, moving forward, adventure, freedom, belonging and so on work best. Commercials use songs with themes that are positive and universal in nature. You’ll rarely find a commercial that uses a sad, break up song to sell a product. It just doesn’t make sense and doesn’t work to evoke the desired emotion.
