Post by Jason on Jan 25, 2014 17:22:44 GMT -5
The release of Pharrell's "Happy" recently got me thinking about movie soundtracks and the lack of hits from them these days. Last summer, when "Happy" was released as a single from the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack, no one paid any attention. Now that the song has appeared in a speaker commercial and is being marketed as the lead single from Pharrell's upcoming album, all of the sudden it's a hot track. The funny thing is, no remixing or re-recording was done to it. It's the SAME SONG that was released last summer to practically zero commercial success.
There was a time...I'd say from the 70s (maybe even the 60s) through sometime in the early 2000s when movie soundtracks were used as a successful promotional tool by the movie studios, record labels, and the artists themselves. From movies like Saturday Night Fever and Grease to Top Gun and Footloose to Boomerang and City Of Angels and countless others, these soundtracks helped market the movies that they came from and vice versa. Sure, there was an occasional Up Close & Personal (which only spawned Celine Dion's "Because You Loved Me") or Armageddon (which only spawned Aerosmith's "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing"). But usually, multiple singles were released from these movie soundtracks. Saturday Night Fever alone spawned TEN singles. (Eleven if you count The Bee Gees' now-classic version of "More Than A Woman," which technically wasn't a single release. Only Tavares' version was serviced to radio at the time.) Six singles were released from the Footloose soundtrack.
I can think of only a handful of songs from movie soundtracks recently that have managed to be hits..."Decode" by Paramore and "It Will Rain" by Bruno Mars from the Twilight movies...and Linkin Park seems to have a hit single from every new Transformers movie. Otherwise, there are very few hit singles from movie soundtracks anymore. I wanted to get your thoughts on why...just as a discussion topic. Is it the advent of the internet, iTunes, and other music download services? It seems to me that the popularity of soundtracks were starting to die-off before download services became popular.
Anyway, I'd be interested to see what you all think.