It used to be that when advertisers went looking for music to use in their commercials, they commissioned original pieces. Or maybe they borrowed either highly recognizable hits (as in Nike's famous ad using the Beatles' "Revolution") or counterculture anthems (The Stooges' "Lust for Life" in a Carnival Cruise spot).

By now most ad-watchers know that this process has been inverted. Advertisers don't want to co-opt hits — they want to make hits. The dream is the Dirty Vegas scenario. Last year, Mitsubishi used a song by the then-obscure band in one of its ads. The mellow but danceable techno number was called "Days Gone By," and thanks to the massive exposure provided by the car commercial, it became a hit. Dirty Vegas went on to sell more than a million records, and Mitsubishi could take credit for breaking a new artist.

Even Rolling Stone has noticed the trend, declaring that "Madison Avenue is the new MTV." But what's less well known is how often the inclusion of a given outré track in a mainstream ad can be traced not to Madison Avenue but to Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, and the basement studio of public radio station KCRW.

Among the station's many fans, in fact, is Vinny Picardi of Deutsch L.A., Mitsubishi's ad firm. Like a lot of ad creatives based in Los Angeles, he values the station's adventurous playlist as a source of music that hasn't yet caught on with commercial radio, but might. And actually he's more than just a fan, because it turns out that Deutsch is one of many agencies that now work directly with the station's DJs.

Early on its music-centric Mitsubishi series, for instance, Deutsch tapped Nic Harcourt, KCRW's program director, who suggested the Groove Armada song "I See You Baby." More recently, the firm worked with DJ Jason Bentley in researching potential music for a Mitsubishi 2003 Outlander spot. One of Bentley's suggestions was "Breathe," by Telepopmusik, a song that had been in rotation on KCRW for months, but was pretty much unheard elsewhere. The Outlander "Breathe" ad appeared (and is still running), and soon Telepopmusik had made its way onto Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart. It's a microcosm of how the music-and-advertising game has come to be played, and how KCRW fits in.

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While many big ad firms are based in New York, L.A. is where spots tend to be produced. Often music and other audio effects are added well after visuals have been shot and the editing has begun. Ad agencies contract "sound design" houses to handle audio production and, traditionally, the creation of original music (or "scoring to picture," as it's called in the trade). But with more and more advertisers clamoring to license existing songs rather than commissioning new ones — even for incidental background music — several L.A. sound design firms have brought in KCRW DJs to serve as in-house "music supervisors." (The term didn't used to exist in advertising, and was borrowed from the film business.) Bentley has signed on with Machine Head. Another firm, Stimmüng, brought DJ Liza Richardson on staff a couple of years ago, and last year added a second KCRW jock, Anne Litt. A third firm, SubZero, hired DJ Tricia Halloran last May.

Increasingly, music is picked at the conceptual stage, and sets a campaign's whole tone. Sometimes advertisers want a music supervisor to track down something incredibly specific — a song about, say, a male friendship that's gone awry. Sometimes they're just looking for a vibe. Richardson, host of KCRW's Saturday night show The Drop, describes the process, how she peppers her clients with questions about the product and its target demo. Then — with a licensing budget in mind — she puts together a well-packaged CD (or several) of possible choices. Karl Westman, senior partner and executive music producer for New York's Ogilvy & Mather, says Richardson's input set the sonic "vocabulary" for a recent high-profile Motorola campaign, with cuts like "Heartfixer" by De Phazz.

Sometimes a music supervisor will simply bring discs to the agency, and play tracks for the relevant creatives. "I roll down to the Deutsch offices," Bentley explains in the cool monotone of a central-casting DJ, "and sit in a conference room with them. It's faster that way." In working on a recent campaign for Honda's new Gen Y-targeted "Element," Halloran huddled with a producer and two creatives, playing music by five artists: "I talk about why I think this or that band is good. It's not unlike being on the radio." In that case, the agency (and then its client) liked Halloran's top choice, which was Kinky, a KCRW favorite from Monterrey Mexico, whose sound balances Latin rhythms, lively guitar riffs, and electronic samples. In an interesting wrinkle, Kinky was actually commissioned to write original music — scoring to picture by an alt-rock band.

So why are so many advertisers chasing exactly the kinds of sounds that KCRW specializes in? Ad agencies and their clients, says Stimmüng executive producer Ceinwyn Clark, "want to be trend-setters and taste-makers, ahead of the curve." That's basically what Detusch's Picardi says, launching a spiel about how Mitsubishi is the "the future," and that's the sound he wants.

Of course, lots of advertisers see their brand as the future, which is why KCRW DJs have become such a popular resource for those who want to associate their brands with the Next Big Sound. After all, the job of the hipster DJ to sort through endless new CDs to find the latest, freshest, most compelling stuff. KCRW music director Nic Harcourt says he listens to about 200 CDs a week, making the call on what gets added to the station's library (with more than 50,000 titles, it's the biggest public radio music library in the country), as well as what he wants to play on his popular weekday show Morning Becomes Eclectic — whether it's album that hasn't been released in the U.S., or even an unsigned artist's demo. KCRW was, for example, the first station anywhere to play Dido, whose song "Thank You" was picked up as the theme to the television show Roswell, then got sampled by Eminem, and went on to be an international smash.

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Not that there's anything in the station's physical aspect to suggest that the place is a cultural influence: Located behind an unmarked door at the bottom of a staircase below the cafeteria of Santa Monica Community College, it looks like a typical public radio station. A recent visit found Harcourt, poised over a soundboard that's been in constant use for several decades. He was chatting on-air, as it happened, with members of Kinky in the adjoining studio. The band has been on the rise, touring the country, garnering strong reviews, and playing Late Show with David Letterman, but KCRW was playing its music when all the group had to offer was demos. Between tunes, the singer made a point to thank Harcourt and the station for the early support.

It's that kind of connection with up-and-comers that makes the KCRW crowd so attractive. "The agencies really buy into the cool factor," says Bentley. He hosts the long-running and influential dance and electronica show Metropolis, DJs at area clubs like Zanzibar, and has worked in A&R for Maverick Records. "They see my name and the kind of identity as taste-maker, DJ, status. And it becomes a package scenario in their minds — 'Oh wow, we're tapping into Jason Bentley as a cool brand.'" Richardson — who may be the most well-known of the KCRW crew because she appeared in an Apple "Switch" ad — not only DJs Friday nights at the Santa Monica club Sugar, but also spun at both the Chiat/Day and Deutsch holiday parties last year.

The ad industry's lockstep search for new new sounds only partly explains the particular influence of KCRW. Broadcasting in L.A. means broadcasting in an entertainment nexus, and one of the great capitalist bastions of the world. "There's no doubt that we are indirectly music supervising half the movies in Hollywood," Harcourt says, partly kidding and partly bragging. (During pledge drives he occasionally tries to guilt-trip the power brokers in his audience to buy a membership to pay for all the musical ideas they've cadged.) And actually, KCRW jocks directly music supervise plenty of films. Harcourt did the job on Igby Goes Down, for instance. Bentley oversees the music in the Matrix films. And the sound track Richardson compiled for Y Tu Mamá También was nominated for a Grammy this year. A competitor in the category: The sound track for the HBO series Six Feet Under, overseen by the firm SuperMusicVision — whose principals are KCRW DJs Gary Calamar and Thomas Golubic.

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Considering KCRW's "cutting edge" reputation among advertisers, it's interesting to hear Halloran contrast it to other public or college stations. KCRW is of course run more consistently and professionally than college radio, and dedicates far more of its air time to original music programs than most public radio. "It's a perfect match for advertising people because it's very artistic, and yet it's accessible," she says. It doesn't run the kind of music shows — and there are plenty of them in public radio — that go so far out that they're actually hard to listen to. "People can get it."

The licensing mania has meanwhile spawned a cottage industry of firms that push specific music catalogs, sending CDs and otherwise pitching directly to ad agencies . Music supervisors who aren't affiliated with a particular set of artists — not just the KCRW crowd, but also firms like New York's Agoraphone — obviously tout their independence as a virtue. And that's not a bad selling point at a time when the bandwagon effect has made the licensing market a bit of a mess.

Costs, for instance, are all over the map. Depending on what kind of rights an advertiser wants, and the status (or desperation) of the artist, a song by a little-known band can be licensed for anywhere from $20,000 or $30,000 right on up to $100,000 for a major campaign. That's low compared to what an established star like Sting or Madonna wants for recognizable hit. But it may be high compared to what original scoring would have cost. SubZero founder Jeff Koz actually thinks a lot of advertisers have overpaid because they don't negotiate licensing fees until after they've already fallen in love with a given track. With the music industry on the ropes, he adds, there's no reason for that happen.

Music supervisors tend to charge a research fee — perhaps a few thousand dollars — and then negotiate finder's fee percentage when songs they pitched are chosen and licensed. This adds up to pretty good money if you happen to be a public radio DJ. And of course one side effect of the trend is that members of KCRW's crew increasingly end up competing against each other in the quest for the perfect song for this or that spot. Has that led to any tension? The DJs all say no, because so many of them are friends outside the studio — but also because, so far, there's lots of work to go around. For the moment, plenty of advertisers see (or hear) the KCRW sound as offering a mainline connection to exactly the consumers they crave. "There's not an inconsiderable irony involved," Harcourt observes, "when you think about the fact that we're a noncommercial station."

Some of the reporting above was used in the March 2003 issue of Business 2.0.

Special thanks to Slate reader Mary Poole for clueing me into KCRW as a story.