I was thinking about how superstar producer RedOne, or Nadir Khayat if you like, has set up a little sonic logo for himself.

I spliced together some examples to compare uses in different tracks, which you can listen to below (excuse the rough editing). He gets the artist on the song he’s producing to sing his name, usually around the same few notes, and always in the intro. The pattern seems to be that with female artists (and Enrique Iglesias) you get the proper jingle format, whereas the guys just shout out his name. 

Said producer tag is usually followed by a comprehensive list of the performers – like a teacher’s role call. Good old Nicole Scherzinger has gone for a rather modest, multi-layered vocal party in celebration of her own name, as you’ll hear below. This kind of thing has started happening in UK music a little, but not with quite the same unselfconscious gusto.

Artists using tags isn’t exactly a new thing; it’s been done, mostly in hip-hop and R&B, since.. ages (does “Shabba” count? “Snoop Do-ggy Do-o-ogg”? Probably) but it’s not quite as crafty as RedOne’s approach. This is someone with a behind-the-scenes role putting himself up front with performers. He doesn’t do it on tracks where he has a ‘featured’ or artist credit. Akon, who he seems to have worked with quite a lot, does a similar thing to promote his record label Konvict Muzik, as heard on some of the excerpts above. Though, again, it’s not quite as set-in-stone as RedOne’s logo.

It’s probably more interesting to see the effect on the oblivious listener; I remember initially wondering why Gaga was mentioning ‘red wine’ until I realised what was going on. I like red wine so much it took quite a while to dawn on me. The important thing though was that it had entered my consciousness as a ‘jingle’, and most likely it has with millions of other people, even if they’re not immediately aware of what it refers to.

You could argue that if a producer’s sound is unique, that’s all the sonic branding s/he’ll ever need. Like Timbaland for example; with him it’d probably be his vocal imitation of record scratching (“wiki wiki” or is it “ficky ficky”?), or that particular vocoder/autotune he uses on his own voice. His backing tracks are so recognizable however that you don’t really need either of the above, though it can’t harm.

The whole phenomenon highlights how much more centre-stage the role of the producer has become (imagine the Cure’s producer in ’87 giving himself a shout-out) and how sometimes the label is more important that the artist. And this would of course be a consequence of artists running their own labels – the performer ego becomes bound up with the business itself. It’s not enough to make money from a song, you need to be recognised as the sugar diddy. It would be interesting to find out exactly when producers first started doing this sort of thing, and also to explore Timbaland’s ‘branding’ techniques a little more.. (Some interesting points about this here)

Anyway, props to RedOne for the business savvy.