Heard any good jingles lately? I thought not.

A piece in AdAge points out that

For New York music houses — recording studios with paid staff and a stable of exclusive writers and producers — the estimated $150 million business was off by 25% last year, according to the Association of Music Producers. That’s following a soft 2000 and 2001.

What’s taking their place? Pop songs. You hear them all over, usually in ludicrous places. The Stones’ “Start Me Up” for Ford and Microsoft. The Clash’s “London Calling” for Jaguar — an link so inappropriate as to be almost obscene. And nearly an entire album of Beck’s has been culled for advertising use.

The trouble is twofold. The first, and lesser, issue is that brands suffer from this. A successful jingle is for the ages. Think “two all beef patties.” Think “the heartbeat of America.”

More troubling is what this means for pop music. It’s not exactly news that what used to be revolutionary and counterculture is now mainstream. But something important is lost when the soundtrack of our lives — the personal connection we have with certain songs — can be co-opted in an attempt to plug that emotion into building loyalty to a product. The Beatles had it right by not licensing anything; Michael Jackson screwed it up by letting Nike use “Revolution.”

Much of this is a lost cause, I know. But so help me, I’ll bust the first TV that I hear using “What’s Going On” to sell me something.

 

From the AP:

 PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. 淼 A couple is suing the franchisee of a McDonald’s restaurant, claiming an improperly prepared bagel damaged the husband’s teeth and their marriage.

 <snip>

 Tracey Johnstone, owner of Johnstone Foods, said she never before had a bagel complaint and had no idea how it could have been prepared in a way that would damage teeth.

“It’s a bagel,” she said.

Newsday’s got a story about how young folk get their news from the Web instead of TV or print. The headline:

Why Won’t Johnny Read?

… missing the point completely that getting information online is reading. Maybe it should have been “Why Won’t Johnny Pay Us $1/Day to Get Only the Information We Want to Give Him in a Format He Doesn’t Want?”

 

Astonishing story from the Boston Globe. Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, presidential candidate, practicing Catholic, member of the prominent Winthrop and Forbes clans, husband to the Heinz food fortune is (wait for it)….

Jewish.

The Globe did some deep genealogical research into Kerry and dug out stuff like his grandfather committing suicide in the men’s room of the Copley Plaza Hotel (with considerable press coverage of the event). And in among it all, they tracked Kerry’s family back to what is now the Czech Republic and a man named Fritz Kohn, who became Frederick A. Kerry.

The senator has known he had a Jewish grandmother for about 15 years but didn’t know much about her, and claims to have long tried to disabuse people about his presumed Irish heritage. The Globe sounded awfully surprised — five grafs worth — to learn that he’s not of the Auld Sod:

Numerous publications, including the Globe, have stated that Kerry is Irish-American.

”I’m sure some people see the name and say, `Hey, I think it’s this or that,’ but I’ve been clear as a bell,” Kerry said. ”I’ve always been absolutely straight up front about it.”

Kerry spokeswoman Kelley Benander said the senator has corrected any misstatement he became aware of. When she was read three examples from Globe clippings in which the senator was misidentified as Irish-American, she repeated that Kerry had corrected misstatements when he read or heard them.

Kerry ”has never indicated to anyone that he was Irish and corrected people over the years who assumed he was,” Benander said.

”It is certainly an understandable misimpression,” she said. ”His name was Kerry, he represents Massachusetts, and he attended the St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts, like everyone else in public life in the state.”

 

Dreadful news today. Just awful. My heart goes out to the family, friends and colleagues of the astronauts.

 

The Editorial Auction story keeps getting better.

Lee Scheslinger, the brains of the operation, says eBay’s now yanked the whole thing. Hardly matters, though, because the story’s now run in the Boston Globe, Wired, and UPI. Lee’s been interviewed on the local Boston Fox News station and has been interviewed by the NYTimes and Reuters. And it made FuckedCompany, which isn’t as important as it used to be, but still counts for something.

This afternoon, another colleague on a private e-mail list we’re all on dropped a line to Reese Schonfeld, a UPI alum and founder of CNN. The upshot is that CNN Headline News will probably be running a story on the whole megillah come Monday.

Sure beats sending out resumes.

 

AOL Time Warner reported its 4Q2002 results today. Cash flow looks pretty good. Revenue’s pretty good. Margins are pretty good.

One thing, though. The company wrote down $44.6 Billion (roughly $10 per share), mostly in goodwill. This is in addition to the $54 Billion it wrote down in 1Q 2002. One hundred Billion dollars in shareholder value evaporated from AOL Time Warner in a year — value that, in truth, wasn’t really there to begin with.

“Fraud” is probably too strong a word to decribe the merger, because AOL was worth what AOL was worth; the Market said so every day by trading its stock where it did.

But wow. $100 Billion gone. (Just so you know, Parker Brothers prints only $50 Billion in Monopoly money a year. Let me repeat that: AOLTW’s writedown this year is two years worth of Monopoly money.)

And Ted Turner’s had enough. Turner, the company’s single biggest stockholder, quit the board today. I’ve got to believe he’s fixing to sue someone. Too much of that $100 Billion was his for him to sit still.

 

The staff of ZDNet’s Tech Update site was laid off not long ago. They apparently liked each other enough to put themselves up for sale on eBay as a working unit.

Unfortunately, this must violate some term or condition or something; because eBay appears to have killed the sale.

Just as well. After 15 bids and with less than 4 days to go, the high bid was $21. Ouch.

Later: maybe they should just buy this. (Thanks to David Hakala for the tip.) Hell — maybe I should buy it….

Later still: One of the editors involved tells me that eBay’s lawyers objected to some of the original post’s wording. The auction’s been reposted here.

And yet later again, the story’s been picked up by the Boston Globe.

 

A bumper crop from Ananova

An Ohio man accused of dialling a sex chat line says he ended up talking dirty to a police chief because he misdialled.

 

There have been a few studies indicating that excessive bicycling can cause male impotence or infertility. Here’s a case where the reverse is true Again, from Ananova:

Indian family planning officials are offering men a ｣20 bicycle if they undergo a vasectomy.