If you listen to Miley Cyrus's Party in the USA, there's a line she sings three times:

and a Jay Z song was on.

Well, I was listening to Elvis Duran & the Z-Morning Zoo on the radio, and the song was played with Miley Cyrus replacing "Jay Z song" with "Elvis Duran," so it was:

and Elvis Duran was on.

That must have cost a few dollars, but it's a NYC radio show, so there are deep pockets and an interest in keeping the show popular.

Do you remember We Built This City by Starship (aka "Jefferson Starship") some years ago? Part of the song had a DJ with a great radio voice speaking and identifying a particular radio station, likely one in San Francisco.

I remember that station after station made a deal to have its own radio ID replace what the DJ was saying. I couldn't say how many stations did it, but in the NYC metropolitan area, it seemed pretty popular.

Clever advertising for Miley Cyrus's Party in the USA, but Starship and We Built This City was there first.

Hey Joe,

Interesting topic, thanks for starting it. Yeah, I agree, that's cool. I find it neat to see marketing integrations like this. At the end of the day, it's not so much about who did it first as it's just a good idea. You can go even farther back than that to Michael Jackson reworking "Billie Jean" for Pepsi (and I'm sure someone probably did it before that!)

In some cases, I bet it's for radio promo, too, where the artist will record the DJ's name in the song, etc. They record a bunch of DJs at once. They typically just do radio "drops," which are the artist introductions you hear where it's like "this is Miley Cyrus and you're listening to..." but this sort of thing is a little more interesting.

Patrick