There was relief all round when the High Court upheld a ruling by the Advertising Standards Agency that the adverts could not

There was relief all round when the High Court upheld a ruling by the Advertising Standards Agency that the adverts could not be shown before the 9pm watershed after 300 people complained that the German company behind the ringtone, Jamba!, had not made clear that its services were on a weekly subscription basis rather than a one-off payment.Moby, NOKIAWhile some artists have reluctantly accepted that fees from commercials can offer them a degree of security that is often hard to find in the music industry, as a struggling young dance artist Moby deliberately pursued a strategy of getting his tracks played in adverts. Combining influences from classical chamber music to Cuban rumbas, the group’s music has also featured in “The Sopranos” and “The West Wing”.Crazy Frog, JAMSTERWhat began life as a Swedish teenager mimicking the sound of a moped engine on a computer in his bedroom, ended up as one of the soar-away chart successes of Summer 2005 – much to the chagrin of parents every where. Crazy Frog was the first example of a mobile ringtone entering the UK charts, where it remained in the number one slot for four weeks.Created by Daniel Malmedahl from Gothenberg, the annoying ringtone was initially promoted by viral marketing on the internet by Jamster, a subsidiary of £4bn US corporation VeriSign. So widespread is their appeal that last year the FBI asked them to play at its Christmas party.In Britain, Pink Martini has filled the Festival Hall and the band has played as far afield as Beirut and Taiwan. Hence the song “Sympathique” including the line “Je ne veux pas travailler” which has achieved Europe-wide fame as the theme tune for a French motor. The track has turned the group into cult figures in Europe and in particular in France, where “Sympathique” was a best-seller.Pink Martini met at Harvard, when visual arts student and singer-songwriter China Forbes met Thomas Lauderdale, a classically trained pianist.

Three years later, she moved to Portland to join his fledgling band. Their influences are Latin music and the films of Pedro Almodovar. The musical collective has since expanded, sometimes numbering up to 12 members.The group’s second album Hang On Little Tomato went straight in at number one on Amazon’s best-seller list and made the top 10 in France, where their popularity persists.In 1997, the year that “Sympathique” was released, Pink Martini played at the Cannes Film Festival at a fund-raiser for the American Foundation for Aids Research, where Elton John joined them on stage. But widespread exposure in the US did not come until his name was linked with a brand whose ambassadors have included Madonna, Missy Elliott, Sarah Jessica Parker and Joss Stone. He went on to feature in the American music bible Billboard’s list of British artists making it big in the States.Lars Jensen, creative director of the Boston-based advertising agency Modernista which matched Badly Drawn Boy with Gap, said at the time he believed it was just the start of US brands using British music. “People aren’t looking at it as a sell-out, but as a way to get their music heard,” he said.Gough’s breakthrough album was followed by another distinctly commercial venture, when he wrote the soundtrack to the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel About A Boy, starring Hugh Grant.Pink Martini, CITROENRemember the catchy little tune that accompanies the advert for the Citro?Xsara Picasso – the one where a machine production line paints modernist symbols all over a car? Thanks to that commercial, a retro band from Portland, Oregon sold 650,000 copies of their debut album “Sympathique”.Pink Martini may be American, but they incorporate influences from a multiplicity of other countries into their lounge-style music, from Portuguese to Japanese and Croatian to French. In 1992, Levi’s used the blues singer John Lee Hooker’s track “Boom Boom”, making him a rich rock star for the last five years of his life.Badly Drawn Boy, GAPThe Manchester-based singer-songwriter Badly Drawn Boy, aka Damon Gough, broke the notoriously difficult to crack US music scene after his track “The Shining” featured in a Gap advert in 2001.Gough’s debut album The Hour of Bewilderbeest won the Mercury Music Prize in 2000.

A favourite of head-banging teenagers for the last decade, until the Levi’s advert Mogwai would have been the last band anyone accused of being overly commercial.The Levi’s brand famously propelled a series of tracks and artists into the Top 10 throughout the 1980s and 1990s, from Nick Kamen onwards. The Scottish post-grunge band Stiltskin topped the charts in 1994 after their single was used. They have since produced five albums, including the latest release, Mr Beast. Braithwaite said the rock group had viewed the advert as an opportunity to raise funds for their record label.”Unless it had been from an incredibly evil, grotesque corporation, there was not a problem, and the research we did on Levi’s suggested they were certainly not in that category,” he told Scotland on Sunday.”We saw it purely as a way of financing our label, and being able to put out more records by other artists,” he added.The Scottish five-piece band formed in 1995 and debuted a year later with the single “Tuner/Lower” released on their own Rock Action label. The band’s lead singer, Stuart Braithwaite, accused critics of musical snobbery and denied the group had sold out.The high-profile commercial, which launched Levi’s new “No 1″ jeans, exposed the 1995 single to a global audience. The car commercial showed teenagers driving around listening to the track in a scenario reminiscent of the hit drama Dawson’s Creek.