We're not ones to cheat and look at Super Bowl commercials ahead of time, but we couldn't help ourselves when we heard Ellen DeGeneres revealed her Beats Audio commercial early.
We thought the same thing you did: Is DeGeneres really the ideal candidate for a company essentially fronted by Dr. Dre, with a streaming service designed by Trent Reznor, and commercials featuring Kevin Garnett and Richard Sherman? Basically, it's a company based on being a badass. Not something the talk show host is known for. So we watched, and were okay with what we saw. One commenter on DigitalMusicNews.com, thought he knew better.
"Who is making the decisions at Beats???" they asked, subtly. "Why Ellen and EDM together? Do Beats' potential EDM users give a rats ass about Ellen? Do Ellen fans enjoy EDM? No and no. Stupid commericial - waste of money. For me, Beats is DOA."
That's an easy argument for a typical troll to make. Consider the influence and taste-making ability that the Beats brand possesses however. We reported yesterday that the no. 3 and no. 4 most downloaded songs in the world last week ("Happy" by Pharrell Williams and "The Man" by Aloe Blacc, respectively) saw huge jumps in sales after appearing in the popular commercials. So we're going to side with Beats on this one.
A medley of great tracks make appearances as part of DeGeneres' playlist, and you can bet all will see dramatic rises in downloads. Representing rock is the classic Black Sabbath track "Paranoid," representing country is superb up-and-comer Brandy Clark's "Stripes" (which this writer ranked as his ninth favorite song of 2013), and the mix is topped off by another soon-to-be hit by Blacc: "Can You Do This?"
The download numbers for the week following the Super Bowl won't be available until February 12, but we'll report back on how well they did. We expect it to be well.
