Combine the antidrug skits you watched in middle school with dollops of oddball airline safety videos and late-night TV commercial jingles.
What you get is a peculiarly Silicon Valley genre: songs created to promote a technology product or company. These tunes are often cringe, or possibly good, or maybe so dorky and earnest that they’re great.
Tech companies have been making self-referential music forever, but social media and the attention on technology have made the spotlight brighter — and their affluence has made the productions more over the top.
Have a listen for yourself.
Behold, I give you a hip-hop track about OneDrive, the Microsoft cloud file cabinet that you might be forced to use at work.
Sample lyric: “Listen up y’all/I got a story to tell/about a cloud that got some mad skills to sell.”
This spring, the start-up Canva performed a seemingly “Hamilton”-inspired musical theater number. Onstage, a cool Canva worker clapped back at a stuffy corporate executive who is reluctant to buy the company’s graphic design software.
Sample lyric: “We don’t train on your work/without your permission/safe and securrrrrr/if that is what you’re wishin’.”
The online reaction to the performance was bananas — mostly in a not-so-good way.
“If cringe was a war, this would be a nuclear weapon,” reads one of more than 2,200 replies to an X post about the Canva performance. Other people loved it.
Canva said the musical number generated a lot of attention, social media mentions and Google searches for the Australian start-up. “While not everyone was a fan, this was a risk that ultimately paid off,” a Canva spokesperson said.
There’s also a flourishing genre of enthusiastic cryptocurrency-themed songs. At a 2019 conference, Vitalik Buterin, the influential executive behind the Ethereum crypto network and the digital currency Ether (known by the symbol “ETH”), awkwardly participated in a self-referential song.
Sample lyric: “ETH 2.0, yo/ETH 2.0, yo/ETH 2.0, yo/ETH 2.0, yo.” (Those are the best lyrics in there.)
Ethereum declined to comment.
And my longtime personal favorite is a 2010 music video in which online shopping site Woot used a rapping stuffed monkey toy to announce that Amazon had bought the company. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Sample lyric: “You can labor every day until you’re tired and old/or wait for Amazon to call and when they do you say, ‘SOLD.’”
Many organizations (or their HR departments) create well-meaning but sometimes ill-advised musical numbers. What’s perhaps unique about the technology-themed ditty is the industry’s embrace of its geek chic to dream up tunes in which the nerds are in on the joke. I think.
Other examples:
🧐 A rainbow-robed electronic musician started a Google developers gathering in May with a manic performance that defied explanation.
Sample lyric: “Don’t worry, baby, Google’s going to wake you right up/Google’s going to come into bed and wake you right up.”
🤓 The start-up investment firm First Round Capital for years staged elaborate holiday music videos packed with insider references to Silicon Valley and start-up finance.
Sample lyric, based on the Pharrell Williams hit: “Because we’re scrappy/Clap along on the path to product-market fit.”
🫣 There’s a music video about the inventor of techie favorite software Linux in the style of Eminem, “Will the Real Linus Torvalds Please Stand Up?” (The Linux Foundation says the ad was a twist on a real IBM advertisement and was a spoof of a blog parody of Steve Jobs.)
😬 Blackberry executives once performed a tweaked cover of an REO Speedwagon love song to persuade app developers to stick with the precursor to the iPhone. Alas, app developers and phone buyers continued to jilt Blackberry.
😰 There are songs and memes inspired by then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s sweaty onstage exhortations about “developers, developers, developers, developers!” from 2000. Ballmer also featured in the incredible scene of Microsoft executives dork-dancing to a Rolling Stones song.
Ballmer, the man who launched a thousand memes, didn’t reply to an interview request sent to his USAFacts organization.
The tongue-mostly-in-cheek technology tunes might make you smile or roll your eyes. I simply wonder if their moment has passed.
Tech companies often still think of themselves as scruffy underdogs with adorable quirks. Except now some of them are trillion-dollar Goliaths commanded by influential billionaires with slickly manufactured personal brands, bro entourages and swarms of groupies.
Start-up in-jokes are nice and all, until you remember that high-profile tech founders have given patients misleading medical test results, landed in prison for stealing people’s money and have the ear of the White House to advocate for electricity-gobbling AI supercomputers.
The tech-themed music might still be corny fun. But the more powerful technology becomes, the more the cute songs start to sound off-key.
One tiny win?
Next time you can’t buy a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert, Ticketmaster has a perk for everyone but you.
The company said Thursday that it would use a feature in the new iPhone software to show more information related to digital tickets, including maps of the venue and recommended playlists in Apple Music (for some reason).