I just puked

Another thing to consider is that the original artists often have no say as to whether there work is used for commercials. It depends on who owns the rights at this point. Remember when the formerly black singer Michael Jackson bought the Beatles catalog ? That's when songs like Revolution and Get Back started to be used in commercials.
And he got them even though Paul McCarney (not exactly a poor kid anymore) owns the rights to a huge number of songs.

The artists hopefully get a piece of the profit for doing the performance, but they don't neccesarily have a say on where and when it is played.

Is this the difference between art and amusement? Art is it's own reward even if it is not recognized as art by others. People who make real art don't do it for the money.

Amusement would be music made by people just for the sake of making music. Not that there's anything wrong with that. People should have the right to do whatever they want with their own music.

People who record for the sake of creating art would be less inclined to whore it out while people who are only in it for the money would sell anything they can.

Is music an exchange value or a use value? And to boot are you forgetting what is the subject and what is the object here. To some of you, the music is the subject and thus has
a use value, to the artist who created the music it has an exchange value which makes it much more an objective concern. If you are interested in this, please read the social philosopher, T. Adorno, and his edited book of articles called "the Culture Industry". This very perceptive member of the Frankfurt School of Social Research ( and a music student of Alban Berg) reasons why monopoly capitalism has turned the artistry of music (and its murky past: how can an artist create music without using the created artistic results as a basis of exchange??), into the culure industry it is. How the culture "business" influences what you hear and even how you hear it. Even your beloved underground rock is grounded in the culture industry, from the very beginning. You think this is a fable of the future? It is here now my friends. Everything you hear and see artistic is already prepackaged and sold. The culture industry is the very fabric of society you live in: from tract housing to TV( T. Adorno has a great article in the book called "how to watch TV", even better is "what is 'free time'"). The book is fairly straight forward to read, however be forwarned, he sometimes uses the theoretical jargon of his "School". For the extremely adventureous, his book "Aesthetic Theory" is for those who want to venture into the realm of late 20th century social philosophy and find out using critical reasoning what art is and is not.

At first reading I thought to myself, "who cares", then at lunch I hear a Ford commercial using "Anyway You Want It" by Journey, a disgrace!

This is another good thread. The gross commercial use of this familar music is done of course to target our age group. Some of you, at this point, are in control of a large portion of the consumer dollars.The artists, as mentioned earlier, are not always in control of the rights to their own work and have lost the say in what is done with it. Who knows if Nick Drake's estate has control of his songs or even if Chris Isaak has control over "Wicked Game".It is too bad to hear some of the tunes used in such a way but american business will find a means to help market product in any viable way possible.This has been going on for many years and will continue to do so.I remember reading a few years ago that Micro Soft paid Mick and Kieth an obscene amount for the right to use "Start Me Up' for one of the incarnations of Windows.Cadillac paid Led Zep some fantastic amount or "Rock N' Roll" which has had by far the longest and most constant run of any song used in an ad I know. It was first used during the super bowl a couple of years ago and has been used constantly right up to the present. You know as bad as it is it always makes me smile the first time I hear an old nugget on a commercial. Like last night when I heard "Happy Jack". I used to play that tune over and over again way back then. The surest cure for all this is just to shut the TV off and donate it to your favorite charity. ;^)

Cheers, Lee