There are quite a few perverse products in which music is used beyond the film and TV world and here's a few of my licensing use roundups:

REAL INDUSTRIAL MUSIC!

Way back in the days of yore licensing preexisting music was rare and jingle writers abounded. Radio station WFMU offers a compilation of the finest industrial ditties written for the likes of Ford, Exxon and 7-11. They all rock, although Clark Equipment's Hooray For Human Engineering is a jingle writing feat in and of itself, if only for fitting the title into a melody.

While I have a personal connection to American Standard's Rosemary Clooney-esque My Bathroom Is A Private Kind of Place, there are others to which one might find some very special meaning or other. Case in point, one wonders why the dubiously named likes of Squibb Pharmaceuticals isn't still thriving to this day with a jingle such as this. Needless to say none of these songs will probably find their way on to Gray's Anatomy, but it does lend another dimension to the meaning of "selling out".

MUSIC GAMES WITHOUT MUSIC!

Next up, a lesson in how to create a music product without licensing any music. Hasbro releases the Music Edition of a game called Catch Phrase, in which participants must name a song title in response to a clue while being distracted by a repeating piece of very painful royalty free library music.

Clues include US Dummy (American Idiot), Brought Together Again (Reunited) and other ambiguously random hints and I am immediately surprised into thinking that the game is vaguely hip. Example: 123 and... Well, Go! by Tones On Tail, of course. Oh. No, wrong. Okay, Again and Again. Duh, Over and Over from Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. Nope. One more try: Not Going and Not Dead. Screw it, how about Bauhaus's Bela Lugosi's Dead (okay, random association kicks in). I give up and go home.

KIND OF CREEPY!

There's nothing inherently wrong per se with the concept: parents and children listen to a vaguely thematic selection of music (Music Talking, and About Goals and Values: Good Music. Good Times. Good Kids.) and then "discuss". In my family, most of the discussion might center around the inanity of Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry, Be Happy and emphatically and consistently skip over Matthew Wilder's track Break My Stride. God forbid any child show an interest deeper than the tracks listed; Ian Dury's Reasons To Be Cheerful is safe on surface level but deeper catalog exploration would inevitably dig up his better songs like, oh, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. Good thing there's a guided discussion book or families across America would be lost.

KIND OF WRONG!

Every election year this happens. A Republican candidate inevitably chooses something they deem hip and cool and usurp it without any given thought to the human being who actually created the music or that musician's inevitable political leanings. This year, apparent Medal of Honor: European Assault fan John McCain uses Barack Obama supporter Christopher Lennertz's composed game music for a campaign ad.