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Product music today

Via Metafilter, I recently discovered this mind-boggling collection of IT-related corporate anthems. Corporations have used songs to rally employees for decades, of course. Many companies (especially department stores and railroad companies) had in-house musical groups in the 1920s... and industrial musicals were the rage among managers, who used them to recruit and motivate employees in the 1950s and 1960s. But who knew companies still made promo music?!

Granted, a solid percentage of these songs weren't actually sanctioned by management, or at least not with any degree of seriousness. "At Honeywell Our Quest Is Quality," for example, was written by an enthusiastic employee in the early 1990s. And the wretched, Philips-themed remake of John Miles' 1976 hit "Music"--which simply replaces the word music whereever it appears with "Philips" (as in "Philips was my first love / And it will be my last / Philips is my future / And it will ever last")--is probably a fake.

But some of them were indeed created for corporate events and miscellaneous rabble-rousing. Of these, the ones I found entertaining are Hewlett-Packard's ode to its fallen email program, OpenMail; Richard Stallman's "Free Software Song" (which uses the melody of a Bulgarian dance tune),  "Come on Board with BlackBerry" (performed calypso-style to the tune of  "Love Boat"). Many of these songs, like the Starbucks number we posted earlier, are based on awful pop hits that they manage to make awful-er. (Hmm, wonder if they got permission...)