In April 2007, only diehard Broken Social Scene fans salivated when band member Leslie Feist released a solo album titled The Reminder. Sales were moderate for the first five months, reaching an average of 6,000 per week.
But that September, Apple released its most impactful ad since it unveiled the Macintosh. The spot had a simple concept: a pudgy iPod Nano laid flat against a white table, with a hand repeatedly removing it to reveal another Nano in another color. Each Nano showed the same music video—the song "1234" from Feist.
Within five weeks of the commercial’s launch, Feist’s total album sales reached nearly 300,000 units. Roughly 100,000 of those sales came after the ad campaign started, according to USA Today. Fast forward six more months and The Reminder had moved more than 730,000 copies, according to Spin.
The undeniably catchy “1234” may have experienced an even greater individual bump. Reuters reported that in the first month after the ad appeared on television, the song went from 2,000 downloads per week to more than 70,000. It eventually leapt into the Top 30 of the Billboard Top 100 chart.
Feist was by no means new. Besides her continued role in Broken Social Scene, she began releasing solo albums in 1999, with 2004’s Let It Die a Juno Award-winning favorite back in her native Canada. But following the iPod Nano spot, Feist was everywhere—performing on shows from Sesame Street to the Grammys, where she received four nominations including “Best New Artist.” Feist even guested on SNL and The Colbert Report, where, naturally, Stephen Colbert summed up her situation perfectly: “I discovered her in a little out-of-the-way club I call an iPod commercial.”
Feist wasn't the first musician to launch off the strength of an Apple commercial; the trend had gained enough attention that The New York Times asked “Is Apple the Oprah for indie bands?” But in the years after "1234," Apple commercials became a less reliable way for bands to make it big. Lightning didn’t strike in the same way for The Submarines, Chairlift, or the Ting Tings, for instance—and that trio is likely the most notable bunch of the post-2007 Apple ad soundtracks.
Today, the multi-year streak when lesser-to-unknown acts caught their break via iDevice ads seems to have ended. When Apple used an unknown Willy Moon for its bouncy iPod reboot spot in 2012, the song (“Yeah Yeah”) only sold 155,000 copies in six months, according to Billboard. (Feist's single sold 180,000 copies within a single month.) So sorry, Julie Doiron, you may be a few years too late.
What changed?
Before (and immediately after) Feist
To interpret the present, it’s important to understand that Apple’s support of musicians went deeper than a few iPod spots. To start, Apple began winning over musicians at a tenuous time for the music and technology industries.
“It’s a very cool thing for musicians and music,” U2 frontman Bono famously said at the 2003 launch event for iTunes. “That’s why I’m here to kiss the corporate ass. I don’t kiss everybody’s.”
The iPod and iTunes prompted an entire decade of Apple defining digital business for the legacy music industry (a mantle that today has been seemingly passed to streaming companies like Spotify and Rdio). This argument has been laid out in plenty of places (there’s even an entire chapter called “The Music Man” in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography), but the gist is this: the iPod changed how we consume music, iTunes and the iTunes store changed how the industry operates, and the iPhone brought all these changes to the mobile phone, which has achieved near ubiquity.
But being music’s suit-and-tie management consultant isn’t exactly exciting. Initially, Apple consciously positioned itself as a young, hip tech company, a move that was vital for Cupertino to reach its current heights. Musical taste was as much a part of that branding as product design.
“I had this crazy idea that we could sell just as many Macs by advertising the iPod,” Jobs said, according to Isaacson. “In addition, the iPod would position Apple as evoking innovation and youth.”
Apple used $75 million of advertising money to pitch the iPod, outspending device competitors by a factor of about a hundred. Early iPod advertisements relied mostly on big, familiar names like Eminem, Bob Dylan, and U2. Only later in the decade—say 2005 to 2008, following a year that saw both U2 and Coldplay in ads—did the tone really shift toward Jobs’ goal of evoking youth.
This mid-decade period is when Apple truly embraced the notion of launching bands like the Fratellis, Caesars, Yael Naim, et al. (All those links lead to nostalgic advertisements; two have the famed dancing silhouettes, and the third is the first Macbook Air spot).
The power of the company’s brand around this time might be best exemplified by the group which came right after Feist. One month after the “1234” spot, Apple garnered headlines for empowering a now-famous, user-created iPod Touch ad: “My music is where I’d like you to touch…” The song in the ad was from an unknown Brazilian group called Cansei de ser Sexy (CSS). According to the San Francisco Chronicle, CSS’ 2006 debut album was selling under 350 copies per week pre-commercial. After the October 2007 launch of the ad, that figure moved above 1,000, and the song—“Music is my Hot, Hot Sex”—snuck into the Billboard Top 100.
"This is one of the rare instances where we can point to a single event and say, 'This is for sure what's driving all of our record sales,'” Tony Kiewel, CSS' agent at Sub Pop records at the time, told the paper. "The band is completely absent from this country and has been for ages. And the record is over a year old."
What made CSS’ success even more astounding was that the very same song was in a similar US ad just months before—but it was unable to make a real blip on the cultural radar. In 2006, Microsoft’s Zune used “Music is my Hot, Hot Sex” to soundtrack an ad about an animated lion and gazelle duo. CSS band manager Joel Mark told Ars last year that this kind of double-dipping is pretty typical for a band. There wasn’t any intent to pair up specifically with tech companies pushing digital music players—rather, the goal was to get the music in front of the public in as many ways as one could.
“Anything you’re doing—when you agree to put a song in a movie that the band likes—you think ‘Hey this is great.’ So many people are going to see this movie, it’ll live online forever, and this will be a good way to promote the music,” he said. “In a way they’re all marketing impressions, and you don’t know what impression will convert someone to like the artist. But the Apple ad was a tangible boost, absolutely. I don’t know if the Zune ad was; I don’t feel like it was. With the Apple thing, it was a big change. You felt things shifting around the band, and that might be the single biggest thing that they’ve done.”
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