But what I'm beginning to hate more about adverts though, is the blatant copying of music used in the background. I imagine the scenario goes something like this: some advertising agency has pitched an advert to a brand, used a piece of music that they thought worked with the product and its message and then at the last hurdle, didn't want to pay the composers because it's too much money.

If you're to believe any of Alan McGee's ghost-written blogs on The Guardian (or his un-punctuated, self-written, caps lock ON, tirades on his MySpace blog) then bands should be making money mostly from royalty appearances on films, adverts, games, et al. But just as people are prepared to illegally download music for free, advertising agencies are happy to do pale imitations of songs to appear on their adverts and pay some copycat artist a slim figure of what they'd have to have paid the genuine creators.

I noticed this a while ago when I saw some advert using Green Day's 'Warning' chord structure to advertise plasters or something. It was cheeky, blatant but... Green Day probably didn't need the money. Next, I saw a hair gel company using a song by another lame pop-punk band, The Transplants. The pattern continued, but as none of the adverts had used lyrics in their songs it didn't seem too awful.

Then I saw this advert for the Seat Ibiza...

Which is a blatant rip-off of The Avalanches 'Frontier Psychiatrist':

Sickening, right? Especially since the original song is so good, so bizarre and has one of the best videos I ever did see...