If you were to ask me what the most popular brands in Pop Music are, without looking at the chart below I’d have probably said Jordan, Adidas, Ferrari, Bacardi, and a handful of others. I would’ve been pretty f’n wrong. Under no circumstances would I have guessed that Rolls Royce is the #1 brand in Pop Music, but it is.
Kim Bhasin and Lance Lambert of Bloomberg analyzed all of the Billboard Top 20 songs from May 2014 to May 2017 for brand mentions. What they found was Rolls Royce reigned supreme with 11 shout-outs. Here’s what the rest of the data looked like:
8 of the top 12 are cars/auto brands, and one of them is an anxiety drug. Across the 280 songs they reviewed from May 2014 to May 2017, there were 212 different brands who received mentions and it was cars and fashion which accounted for the vast majority of those mentions.
The brand mentions in pop music these days doesn’t seem nearly as invasive as it did from like 1998 to 2008. There was a time when I stopped listening to the radio entirely because it felt like everything was a fucking ad. The music was all pumping brands non-stop and then you’d be forced to listen to ads in between the ads, and that shit would never end. Like I said, it’s gotten a lot better these days but as you can see from the chart above Pop Music is still full of brand shout-outs.