24 TV Series Episodes

How to Find the Titles and Singers of Songs Played on TV Shows!

You’re watching your favorite TV show. The heroine has been resisting the charms of her male partner all series long, but finally the moment all viewers have been waiting for comes – she melts into his arms and they kiss.

Suddenly you’re no longer interested in the kiss. What IS that song playing in the background? Who is singing it? You MUST know, so you try to catch a few words and rush off to the computer to Google it. Meanwhile the heroine and her partner are either getting it on, or there’s a sniper outside the bedroom window about to kill one of them off. Who cares! You have to have that song!

I wonder if shows in the Fifties, like Dragnet or Highway Patrol, have songs playing in the background? Probably not. This is a much more recent innovation, and gradually the music played on television shows is becoming as important as the action. In “Cold Case”, for example, the music is cleverly taken solely from the year in which the action takes place. Several episodes of that show have featured the music of only one artist. Bruce Springsteen springs to mind.

When a show features a particular song, it can have quite an effect on the career of the artist, and can inspire a sudden surge in sales or downloads of the particular song. The UK group Headway has had a few of their songs featured on American shows and whether it’s a direct result or not of that exposure, they have recently been the opening act on the UK tour of Matchbox 20 and will shortly open for OneRepublic.

Another group to benefit from having their music played on TV is “The Kin”, who have had an upsurge in sales of their songs having been featured in “Army Wives” and “Moonlight”. Speaking of “Moonlight”, the vampire detective/love story which was inexplicably canceled after just one season by CBS, that show’s fans were frantically searching for the titles and singers of songs featured in each episode within seconds of the show having aired. People on the west coast were on forums searching for the music from fans on the east coast where the show had already aired.

My top song played on TV shows? It’s the one that started my interest in this modern day phenomena. It was played at the end of an episode of “Without A Trace” during a particularly poignant scene. I sort of knew the song before but the emotional scene and the powerful words had me determined to buy it. That song was, I discovered, “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley. It’s since been played in many other shows.

With a crop of new shows about to start in the Fall, it will be interesting to see if they generate as much interest in the songs they play as the shows themselves.