Licensed music and daytime soap operas

[GSGfan2017]

Besides Santa Barbara, were there any other American daytime dramas that utilized particularly heavy amounts of licensed music in the '80s?

[robbwolff]

 

Santa Barbara was hardly unique in its use of licensed music. Soaps were heavily using licensed music before SB was even on the air.

[titan1978]

GH and Days were both well known for actually driving up music sales by using songs for characters and in storylines.

 

What  i I do not know is how popular this was before Monty used it so much on GH.

 

Most infamous use was Rise being played as Luke raped Laura, and several times during the week in flashbacks and hearing the song upsetting her helped the song be a huge hit.  Gross.

[Dan]

 

Love GL using the Donna Summer/Barbara Streisand duet "No More Tears (Enough is Enough) as the backing music to Roger, in an eerie clown costume, chasing Rita through the carnival Hall of mirrors in 1979.

 

Then there was the montage at the end of the 1992 blackout with" Round Midnight" by Linda Rondstat. 

[Sindacco]

 DAYS used to play licensed music regularly in the past. They stopped doing that around 2007.

[GSGfan2017]

Was the synthesized music GH utilized circa 1981 licensed, or was it composed and recorded in-house?

[Gray Bunny]

Wasn't there a remake Whitney Houston performed on As the World Turns around the Betsy/Steve heyday, when ATWT hit 20 million viewers for their wedding? 

[DramatistDreamer]

 

I had no idea that Nobody Loves Me Like You Do was a remake!!

 

Funny that both versions were released only a year apart!

 

Whitney Houston and Jermaine Jackson actually performed the duet on As The World Turns. 

 

Another song that received a lot of play (although the artist never performed on the show) was Billy Ocean's Suddenly which got played almost constantly in 1986 and 1987 and even was heard a bit in '88, not to mention 1989 when Craig and Sierra reunited.

 

Speaking of Whitney, I can also remember hearing Bobby Brown's My Prerogative blasting during a scene in '88 (I think) in the downstairs club, The Cellar.

 

Also, I recently posted a cute scene between Lily and Dusty where they were dancing to Prince's Let's Go Crazy  very unusual for Prince to license his music, knowing what we know about how tightly he controlled music rights to his songs during his lifetime. I guess this was early enough in his career before he started clamping down on permissions.

 

 

In terms of The Young and The Restless, the only song I remember hearing was Bless The Beasts and The Children which came from a movie song-track which also featured Nadia's Theme which became Y&R's theme song. Maybe they got a packaged 2 for the price of 1 deal?  Unlike the other songs if not for Y&R, it's unlikely that most would remember either song so many years after they made the charts.

[GSGfan2017]

What about stuff used as incidental music?  Did that stuff tend to be licensed as well?  Check out this Wikipedia article.  Also check out this page.

[All My Shadows]

ATWT was still using licensed music (albeit older hit songs) in its last year. In fact, the very last scene is set to the score of Prince of Tides, which is why you can find clips of the scene online that use different music. Many people were upset because the actual ATWT from the 70s would have worked just as well at setting the particular tone they were going for.

Re: Bless the Beasts and Children. The Carpenters recorded a pretty successful version of it around the same time Nadia's Theme became Nadia's Theme. It was originally "Cotton's Dream" in reference to the scene in which it played in the movie BTBAC.

AMC used the opening phrase of Pino Donaggio's theme from Carrie in a 1987 episode.

[Cheap21]

Port Charles literally named their storylines after licensed songs

[dragonflies]

I remember GH used "Think of Laura" when Genie left and Laura disappeared

[NothinButAttitude]

 

We're people really upset about them using the score from Prince of Tides? I thought it was beautiful and it worked on me. It had me in tears. 

[dragonflies]

I remember Soap Super couple's had their own "songs" in the 80's. I can't remember Bo & Hope's argh
 

[applcin]

The couples, especially, Luke & Laura, had their "theme songs."  L & L had several, actually, together and individually. They also had "Fascination", which they danced to in Wyndham's and at their wedding. When Laura went missing, presumed dead, it was "Think of Laura." When Luke & Holly met, theirs was "Baby, Come To Me." Robert & Anna in flashbacks had "All In Love Is Fair." And Jack Wagner sang a couple of songs on the show, "All I Need" and "Lady of My Heart", which then hit the charts in real life.