When I was a kid, I noticed local radio and TV commercials that used regular "store" records as background and even foreground music. At Christmas, many local ads were scored off of Bert Kaempfert and Mantovani's Xmas albums, and one car dealer used the chorus "hook" from Patti Page's "Cross Over The Bridge" as more or less his jingle. ("Cross over the bridge to savings...") And local shows well into the 70's borrowed their "themes" from everyone from Leroy Anderson to Barry White.
Sometime in the 80's (?) all this changed, and everything had to be scored from production-library music, which (at least the stuff most stations here bought) sounded cheap and probably was. Was it ASCAP/BMI or the RIAA that brought this about, or changes in copyright laws? (This was long before the "Sonny Bono" copyright law, so I can't even blame him for that!) Does anyone have an authoritative answer?
Sometime in the 80's (?) all this changed, and everything had to be scored from production-library music, which (at least the stuff most stations here bought) sounded cheap and probably was. Was it ASCAP/BMI or the RIAA that brought this about, or changes in copyright laws? (This was long before the "Sonny Bono" copyright law, so I can't even blame him for that!) Does anyone have an authoritative answer?