The Moby Quotient [I]n the late 1990s, the techno artist Moby, as hip as they come, openly boasted of having sold every track of his breakthrough album "Play" to an advertiser, or to a film or TV soundtrack. The album should perhaps have been called "Pay." In homage Bill Wyman of Hitsville has dubbed his formula for determining the offensiveness of a rock-based advertisement. (accompanying article)
posted by caddis on Oct 16, 2007 - 138 comments

Money on the Wall: PostMichael McKeeism meticulously perfects the art-form that Warhol dreamed of, The Who toyed with, and and others are desperate to avoid. Transactionism is an observation of art, the artist/patron relationship, and our own values, such as they are.
posted by hermitosis on Mar 19, 2006 - 7 comments

Indianapolis is getting a Whole Foods Market. Great, right? Whole Foods Market is a recognized leader in the ecologically friendly organic foods business and includes in its "Core Values" Wise Environmental Practices & Community Citizenship. The location where this new market will be built will require the leveling of 17 acres of wooded land adjacent to a 50 year old residential neighborhood of 350 homes. This wooded area is one of the last homes for wild animals in the area. Oh yeah, nobody that lives in the area wants it built either. So much for core values.
posted by internal on Jan 24, 2006 - 172 comments

Every year, the NME posts it's chart of the albums of the year poll - this year however they've decided to rig the results purely for commercial purposes. (List inside)
posted by gi_wrighty on Nov 30, 2005 - 72 comments

What if Nike never apologized and then got away with it? A few weeks ago Nike stole Minor Threat's classic album cover and with a few tiny changes tried to make it their own to promote a skateboarding tour. Not to give other immoral megacorps any ideas, but...
posted by tsarfan on Jul 6, 2005 - 15 comments

Followup: Wired runs an article called "Fark Sells Out, France Surrenders". Drew Curtis writes a response (note the sycophantic totalfarkers and more annoyed normal-farkers) -- but, as the article says, "when pressed on the issue, Curtis refused to deny that Fark accepts payment for placement of links". Was this really a case of one sales rep getting "a little overenthusiastic"? Is Drew ever actually going to deny selling Fark out, or will he just keep writing non-responses detailing his plans for selling it out even more in the future?
posted by reklaw on Aug 6, 2004 - 43 comments

Bending over for Boeing: What does it mean when your city will spare no expense in an effort to impress a few corporate suits?
posted by aladfar on Apr 19, 2001 - 21 comments

Rip Mix Burn? The issue here isn't the usual, "Did they sell out?" It's more a case of, Is this stellar groups saying Napster is OK (in a roundabout way), or did they just need the cash?
posted by raysmj on Mar 19, 2001 - 28 comments

"After the J. C. Penney ad ran, they got a letter from a fan wondering how they could be that desperate; did they need the money for an operation or something?" Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine covers the Apples in Stereo and other bands that are jeopardizing their realness by selling songs to advertisers.
posted by rcade on Mar 10, 2001 - 22 comments

Network Solutions sells out. The once-monopoly has decided to pool all their domain name registration information and sell it to the spammers of the world. From their marketing website, "Taking advantage of our position as a market leader, we have organized our pool of over 15 million registered domain names into a customer database of over 5 million unique customers. Our data service offers access to the key decision-makers behind millions of leading Web businesses."

True, there is a privacy policy, and you can try and protect yourself following their instructions, but it would seem that once the cat's out of the bag... And, what's to keep someone from purchasing the database of email addresses, fax numbers, telephone numbers, and addresses and selling them off to someone else?
posted by warhol on Feb 15, 2001 - 35 comments