...So I was wandering through my locally owned and operated, Non-Cub, Non-Rainbow Grocery Store, when I saw an endcap filled floor-to-ceiling with Oreo cookies and some kind of contest emblazoned on the side of each package. Turns out Oreo held a contest for their "Ice Cold Milk and an Oreo Cookie" jingle. Anyone can enter a jingle, and everyone can vote for the winner.

At first, I was pretty salty about the whole thing, my initial reaction was disappointment. Can't they afford to pay someone to write a jingle for them? Doesn't their marketing department know what a good jingle sounds like? Have they lost touch with their target market, and now they have to ask their target market which jingle they prefer best?

Of course the answer is much simpler, (and if I watched TV at all, I would have figured this out sooner) Nabisco is simply cashing in on the popularity of the 'Star Search' shows. Makes sense to me, to connect your product in some way to something that is popular.

So the Oreo Jingle goes through some kind of social filtering process, where multiple versions are constructed and then filtered by those who participate, supposedly resulting in the 'best possible Oreo jingle ever'.

Hmm. I have an idea. Let's take this a step further. First off, let's apply this to not just the Oreo jingle, but to some generic piece of music. Instead of the public contributing seperate songs, lets have them be more involved, and actually work on the song together, voting on the proper key and tempo of the song, the instruments involved, the structure of verse-chorus-verse and even the individual notes that are played, their intonations and durations and such.

Sound crazy? It sure does.

Sound familiar? It sure should.

How long before Open Source Music becomes a genre?

Just remember where you heard it first...

Blog on,
-CZ

Labels: Million Dollar Idea