Slashdot Mirror
Corporate Anthems Go Corporate
Peter Judge writes: "Corporate Anthems are once again online at ZDNet UK.
Last year, the Corporate Anthems page exposed a big bunch of amusing songs composed for corporate promotion. However, the music files had to go offline due to bandwidth limits.
Now, ZDnet UK has stepped in, to host the anthems in all their glory. We hope to flush out and publicise new ones, and will be updating the chart in the coming weeks, according to the 'popularity' of different tracks. We have included more lyrics -- transcribed with some effort (and several lines which surely can't be for real)."
Actually, Gibson assumed in his sci-fi that Japanese culture would eventually come to dominate the future (carried by their corporate success). The scene you describe was probably based upon a similar tradition in Japanese companies (at least in the 80's anyway) designed to build team unity. So people have been doing this for several decades, just not in the US.
The subject of corporate anthems immediately reminded me of one of the characters in Douglas Adams book, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". He worked for a startup company that wrote software to generate corporate anthems based off of the a company's financial performance. Japanese companies tended to produce fast tempo pop music while European companies produces something akin to funeral marches. I wonder what dot coms would generate?