Perhaps you read that Mariah Carey's upcoming CD, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, will come with a 34-page booklet packed with ads for upscale perfumes and liquors. Her label, Island/Def Jam, is promoting the venture as a ground-breaker in integrating marketing for a music industry that has seen a steadily increasing decline in music sales over the past decade. But as pioneering as it is, Mariah is not the first artist to dip her toe into musical product placement by teaming up with advertisers to hawk her music.
Last year, Chris Brown's label cut a deal with the Wm. Wrigley, Jr. company to have the singer turn his song "Forever" into a jingle in ads for Doublemint gum by using the 1famous "double your pleasure, double your fun" tagline. While plenty of singers have lent their songs out to be used in commercials, the collaboration with the gum maker and Brown — whose ads were pulled after he was arrested for assaulting Rihanna — presented a new level of corporate collaboration.
Coca-Cola recently recruited Cee-Lo Green from Gnarls Barkley, Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump, Panic! At The Disco's Brendon Urie, Gym Class Heroes' Travis McCoy and Janelle Monae to write and sing a new jingle, "Open Happiness," which was turned into a music video aired, among other places, on MTV. And last year, Santigold, Pharrell Williams and Strokes singer Julian Casablancas hooked up to write "My Drive Thru," a jingle for Converse sneakers.
For years, artists like Jay-Z and Diddy have hyped their own brands in songs, and others, like Busta Rhymes, have gotten deals on the back end after paying tribute to liquors like Courvoisier in verse. But more recently, new band Parachute acoustically reworked their song "She is Love" to serve as the "single" for a new ad for beauty products giant Nivea. The deal was such a success that the band's next single is also going to be used in a Nivea ad.
But frankly, these deals pale in comparison to a few of the most notorious product placement gigs in music history. First came British rock icons the Who, whose third album, 1967's The Who Sell Out, was packaged as a concept record with fake commercials between the songs but which led to lawsuits by real commercial interests who cried foul over the parodies. Then there was Flaunt It, the notorious 1986 debut album from New Wave supergroup Sigue Sigue Sputnik, on which the band sold actual ad time between songs alongside fake ads that they created themselves.
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We here at MTV News are a pretty diverse bunch, so the views expressed by some in our more official-type year-end lists (like James Montgomery's 
