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Microsoft Songsmith Commercial

Duker910 HN recommenders · 2009–2020
2M views · other · dated · Uploaded 2009-01-08

A promotional commercial for Microsoft Songsmith, software that generates backing music from a vocal recording. The ad became widely known for its awkwardness.

HN cites it as an infamous example of terrible advertising, though a few mention how big a splash it made in 2009.

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5 comments from Hacker News

@pedalpete2009 · in “Microsoft Songsmith creates an interesting song from just a voice recording”

This is a much better promotional tool for songsmith than that 'internal' video microsoft put out a few weeks ago. [VIDEO] this is actually appearing to be a pretty amazing product.

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@scrame2010 · in “New Google ad strategy: 10 minutes of a guy saying "pizza"”

Microsoft has a long history of terrible advertising. Here's ballmer in a tacky suit selling windows 1.0: [LINK] Windows 386 (second half, bear with it): [LINK] Songsmith: [VIDEO] And of course, the absolute worst: [LINK]

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@k-mcgrady2013 · in “Xbox One Revealed”

The commercial for Songsmith was one of the worst things I'd ever seen: [VIDEO] I really wish your comment hadn't reminded me of it :)

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@spoppy2019 · in “Microsoft Comic Chat”

Do you mean SongSmith? That wasn't 1990s, more like 2009, but made quite a splash at the time with their famous video commercial. [LINK] [VIDEO]

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@skuthus2020 · in “YouTuber creates fake Nirvana song using artificial intelligence”

Also, to follow up, the introduction campaign for Songsmith is one of the worst things I've ever seen [VIDEO]

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