PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Bačuvčík, Radim
TI  - Music in TV Advertising: a Quantitative Study
DP  - 2014 Jun 11
TA  - Musicologica Olomucensia
PG  - 7--28
VI  - 19
IP  - 1
AID - 10.5507/mo.2014.001
IS  - 27879186
AB  - Music plays a considerable role in current television commercials. A quantitative analysis of 1,584 television commercials broadcast in the last few years by the Czech nationwide television stations showed that music occurs in 94.0 % of them, which is one of the largest numbers recorded among comparable studies in different countries. However, there are big differences in how music is used in the commercials. In the most of the spots the music is just used in the background. Sometimes commercial creators seem to think that music simply must be in their commercials, regardless of whether it has any relation to the other aspects of the commercial or not. On the other hand, there are many examples of deliberate inclusion of music in the production of TV spots, including cases where the whole spot is clearly built primarily on the music used. Only one in ten spots can be said to possess a combination of music with other components that is clear and visible, which is a big contrast when compared to the more than half of the spots where the music was evaluated as fulfilling a merely background role. This study also shows how commercial music creators currently work with particular music design elements such as tempo, tonality, musical types, genres, or lyrics to transfer or highlight the advertising message.