Is a Commercial Any More Commercial Than Any Other Recording?

We mentioned a few days ago that Stevie Wonder and India.Arie had the first Grammy nomination ever for a song specifically recorded as a commercial. Here’s the next step:

ALANA DAVIS is a sort of alternative singer who left her contract with a major record company last summer. The other day, she described her first recording session since leaving the record biz. It was a dream. “You want everyone to like you, and you don’t want to sell out,” Ms. Davis, 28, said. “For me to be able to sing a great song and not have someone hire a choreographer or have to worry about my image – it’s much purer.”

What a relief.

As it happens, the session was for a television commercial, and if Ms. Davis saw it as an alternative to selling out, for an ailing music industry it represents an experiment along a new frontier of marketing, in which the lines between entertainment and advertising, already blurry, cease to exist.

The advertisement, which features Ms. Davis singing the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tune “Carry On,” will run next Sunday during the Super Bowl, promoting Sony camcorders, televisions and laptop computers. Then the following Tuesday, Columbia Records, which is owned by Sony, will release a longer version of the song as a single.

Ms. Davis does not appear in the ad, but the closing frames will credit her and give a Web address where viewers can download the song for 99 cents. The song will also be available in stores. [NY Times]

I’m not sure whether this a good move for Alana Davis’ career or not – I’m guessing it can’t hurt – but the point is how fluid things are right now, the industry is being forced to look at all of their assumptions anew and it’s good to see they are finally doing it.