You may have heard there was an earthquake Wednesday night in England that was felt as far as away Holland, measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale. No deaths, but it was strong enough to knock a few teapots from their shelves, rattle grandma’s false teeth and leave the family dog constipated for a week, that. I heard it from my brother over there, who sent me a text message 22 minutes after it happened saying: “I think we just had an earthquake in York.” I immediately checked the BBC and the AP — nothing. A glass of wine later (I figured if he was texting me, my brother was okay), I checked again and a headline scrolling across the BBC website confirmed the story; grandmas across the Midlands were calling to report rattled teeth and constipated dogs.

That one man in Yorkshire can tell his sister two thousand miles away in New York about an earthquake mere minutes after its occurrence and before the news bastions report it says less of the immediacy of media technology today than it does of our attitude to events that once would have seemed, if you’ll pardon the expression, earth shattering.

In the Dark Ages, people cowered in terror in their mud huts wondering why “God” was angry at them. Fifty years ago, folks rushed to their radios after the panic was over and undoubtedly kept the following day’s newspaper as a souvenir of “the day I almost died.” The next generation spent hours glued to their television screens which a few years later would instead be computer screens. Today, people fire off a quick text, update their FaceBook page to say: “Julia felt the earth move under her feet,” and then get on with their day. (I for one have nothing against this laissez-faire attitude. To the contrary, I think humans generally overthink these things — any other life form would simply find a safe place to weather the storm and then get back to foraging for food, stalking prey, mating, etc.)

This is not say that we are more superficial today than our forefathers; the attitude shift is an inevitable result of our wider knowledge of the universe, basic understanding of seismic activity and fault lines, etc. It does however raise the interesting question of how a musician can make a lasting impact in 2008 when not even an earthquake can. How do you craft a hit song that makes people do more than text their friends and update their social networking sites? It may be an indicator of success when thousands of people have your song loaded on their MySpace pages so that visiting “friends” will hear it, but the problem manifests the next day when everyone has switched to a new song.

This is one of many questions we’re asking ourselves every day in this business, but still we’re not giving up on the concept of a hit song (we’d kind of have to quit our jobs if we did). Oh, for the days like February 7th, 1964 when four Liverpudlians could fly into J.F.K. and virtually eclipse everything else happening in America that day! But, there were less than half the amount of Americans back then than there are today; so, more people making music, more people buying it. Good, right? But then there is that pesky question of competition, all those iPods and the internet offering us all this choice. All this new media to harness — get the featured artist slot on MySpace, make the song into a ringtone so fans can download it to their phone, and still you’re competing against thousands of other artists. Geez, all the Beatles had to do was show up.

Easily the most talked about approach of the moment for getting your song out there is music licensing; placement on Grey’s Anatomy or Lost or a commercial for an Apple product so that it’s heard by millions every view or download or ad break. Genius!

I know, I know. If you’re a radio programmer it’s possible that you doth protest. “I don’t want to play a song from an ad, it’s so…..commercial!” Well, get over it. The Beatles made whole movies to provide vehicles for their music. And this shit works: The Reminder from Feist has had over 800,000 downloads, a good chunk of which occurred immediately after her iPod ads aired. Yael Naim peaked at #7 on the Hot 100 chart before radio was even serviced with her song “New Soul” when it was featured on the new MacBook commercial. The downloads on “Killing the Blues” from Robert Plant & Alison Krauss are up 181% since the JCPenney’s commercial began its run. Ingrid Michaelson and Joe Purdy are both independent artists who’ve experienced downloads in the hundreds of thousands following commercial exposure. There is nothing deceptive or sleazy about this approach, but times are changing. So keep up! This may be the closest thing we have to hit making these days, and it’s no bad thing.

Consider this: radio listeners know that song and they’ve read the artist bio online before you get it on the air. How’s that for your precious familiarity? And if you worry that your listeners might complain you’re playing “that song from the commercial,” you shouldn’t. Many of them are most likely part of the millions who have responded to a commercial and consequently downloaded a song. And those musicians that we all claim to love and support? They get to make an income (minus Apple’s obligatory 30% of course). And make more music!

Go ahead, play the song. The tremor might be smaller than the one you felt when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hit the airwaves, but a song can still rock your world.

–Julia Clarke