Mysterious ways: Apple’s musical journey from U2 to indie cool—and back

Why you’ve heard of Feist instead of Willy Moon, and why it’s unlikely to change.

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[mike8675309]

Perhaps the difference now is that the music shown in those commercials where they succeeded for the bands had a sound that worked for a larger amount of people. If you listened to the top 40 type of music at the time each of those commercials came out, how many of those indie bands were playing something quite different vs just playing something similar to what was already on the chart?

Thus perhaps whoever was finding the bands before knew what they were doing, and the more recently picks were not.

One other data point. I just picked up the deadmau5 album 4x4=5 off google play music all access for two reasons. It was something different then what I already had but sounded good. And google had it for free. (they've had free albums I didn't have an interest in, so free was not the only factor)

 

[mike8675309]

Static and Noise[/url]":3korf00u]This article reminded me of Shonen Knife. Most of you haven't heard of them, but that's fine. They're a Japanese indie band that Microsoft used in a commercial in... 1998 I think? That's way before Apple started using indie band to boost their credibility. I was a fan of them from, like, 1990. And it blew my mind that they were suddenly in a Microsoft commercial.

That reminded me of Weezer. I first heard them on from a early beta of Windows 95 CD off MSDN when the video for Buddy Holly was included on the disk. I ended up purchasing their self titled album. My threshold for buying an album is essentially I need to have 3 songs on it that I like. I ended up with 5 tracks I enjoyed on that one.