Who picks the songs for those Apple commercials?

Mon, Dec 8, 2008

Featured, News

Getting your song featured on an Apple commercial is a great way for a musician to create band awareness and generate a lot of sales.  Feist saw a huge bump in sales when her song “1234” was featured in an iPod Nano commercial, and Yael Naim came out of nowhere when her song “New Soul” was heard on the memorable MacBook Air commercial (the song eventually cracked the billboard top 10).

But how do you get your song on an Apple commercial?  Who do you have to get in touch with?

Well, apparently Steve Jobs is one avenue you can take.

In an interview with SongFacts, Lars Iversen of The Asteroids Galaxy Tour discusses how their song “around the bend’ came to be featured in Apple’s heavily rotated iPod Touch ads, which tout them as the funnest iPods to date.

We have this company working for us in the States called Synch, and they got in touch with Apple. I think they had this meeting with Steve Jobs himself, and he picked that song out of the bunch and said, “This is it, this is the new track for the iPod Touch.” Apparently he just loved that track, but we never saw it as one of our singles. We have some other songs that we thought would be great singles, and that would work cool on for the radio, but he really loved that song.

The band, however, was a  little taken aback by the final edit that Apple used in the commercial.

They keep it under wraps up to the release of the new product, so we were just told: “You guys are going to be in this ad, and you have to be happy and smile about that,” and that’s very cool, but there was not much we could do about that edit. It’s okay. I kind of like it now when I’ve seen it a few times, it sort of works well with the pictures – you see two hands playing with the iPod and all these silly computer games and so on.

Oh well, you can’t win em all.  Interestingly, though, all mention of Steve Jobs has now been removed from the original article.

You can check out Feist’s iPod Nano commercial below.

And if you’re still reading, check out Yael Naim’s commercial below.

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