As record sales have basically become a non-factor on the balance sheets of musicians and labels alike, professional musos are looking elsewhere to try and make a living off their craft, namely syncs and advertising.

You can call it selling out if you want to, but it’s simply the nature of the beast these days. A band or artist can make a good chunk of change doing an ad and then use that money to finance other projects, like touring.

So how much money is actually on offer? Well, it all depends on the company involved and the artist. Many companies opt to collaborate with professional songwriters who receive a fee for a song written just for the ad.

But in the case of Father John Misty, he was allegedly offered “a quarter of a million dollars” by US fast food company Chipotle to perform a cover of the Backstreet Boys hit ‘I Want It That Way’ for their latest campaign.

As Consequence of Sound reports, Misty took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, a day after his onstage rant at the XPoNential Music Festival, to muse about the current state and relevance of folk music.

As he prepared to perform his song ‘Bored in the USA’, Misty revealed he was offered the handsome sum but turned it down. “Yep, that’s my life,” he joked. “I was like, ‘Cool, so then I can just buy like two Cadillacs and just crash them together.”

“I don’t want your f***ing burrito money,” he added. The “burrito money” eventually went to My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, who sits on the festival’s board of advisors, and Brittany Howard, frontwoman of Alabama Shakes, one of the festival’s headliners.

However, Misty later clarified on Twitter that he was not attacking James or Howard, but was instead creating “a discussion on whether folk music is good for anything anymore other than just the selling of things”.

When Portishead’s Geoff Barrow suggested the singer-songwriter should have simply taken the money and ran, Misty was adamant, “Have you seen this f***ing commercial?” he tweeted back. “It’s like if Orwell got hired by an ad agency.”

So there you have it, if you’re an independent artist of some prominence and partner with a company that has cash to throw around, there is serious money to be made in producing a song for an advertising campaign.

However, since every artist is also the custodian of their craft, it’s ultimately up to the individual muso to decide whether or not they feel it’s ‘right’ to do so, even if the money may be incredibly tempting.

Get unlimited access to the coverage that shapes our culture.
to Rolling Stone magazine
to Rolling Stone magazine