Not So Fast Sigur Rós

jca

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In a recent post entitled "homage or fromage", the official site for the Icelandic band Sigur Ros calls out advertisers they believe are mimicking their music in various TV commercials. The article makes it a point to emphasize the band has "never allowed their music to be used to sell anything. And they get asked a lot". They cite an email back in 2006 from an ad agency working for automaker Audi:

I know that Sigur Rós aren't generally up for having tracks used in advertising, but we're currently working on an ad that I didn't want to dismiss without first running it past you. It's a commercial for Audi's Quattro system (please see the attached script). Audi's advertising is generally considered to be amongst the best car advertising and the script looks like it could be quite good.

The band declined, but claim Audi went ahead and created a TV ad that sounds "strangely familiar". This idea is illustrated with a screenshot they took of two posts from the Adtunes Forums:

You politely decline, and then in Oct 2006 you start to see posts on the Adtunes forum like this:

audipost.png


So the site is claiming that Sigur Ros was contacted by Audi in 2006, the band said no, then Audi started running an ad in 2006 with a soundalike track, and people commented that the Audi ad sounded like Sigur Ros. The problem is rather than linking to the forum thread at Adtunes, they posted screenshots. Here is the actual Adtunes thread they referenced, but chose not to link to:

Audi A4 "Living Room" Truth in Progress

That Adtunes thread is about the award winning ad song in the 2009 Audi A4 commercial created by composer Nathaniel Morgan for Elias Arts that first ran in 2008:


But the Sigur Ros post is about an Audi ad that ran in 2006. So why is the Sigur Ros site cherry picking comments from a 2008 message thread as proof of something that happened in 2006? What do comments about a Audi commercial that ran in 2008 have to do with a presumably different Audi ad (that they never identify) that ran in 2006? That seems misleading at best.

The band posted several examples of suspect TV commercials and the Sigur Ros songs they think are being reproduced (which they asked their fans to find on their official message board), which makes for interesting listening. There are plenty of examples where fans have mistaken Sigur Ros music as being used in ads, just as they have with countless other bands.

But if the official site for Sigur Ros wants to call out advertisers for copying their music in TV ads they can do it without posting misleading screenshots from our site to support their claims.

Update:

Since our original article, the Sigur Ros official site has "corrected" their original post to match the dates we pointed out were wrong, along with a follow-up post explaining their 2006 vs 2008 date mix-up was nothing more than they "hit a '6' instead of an '8'". Maybe their keyboard is broken because in addition to 2008 coming out as 2006 (twice), their site does not seem to be using any capital letters whatsoever.
 
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