Microsoft Songsmith: Empowering the Singing Dork Class

A friend passed this video along with the explanatory note, “It’s a commercial for a new music-related Microsoft product, and it is so astoundingly bad that I should probably be applying for the jobs of the people who wrote, produced and acted in it.” Commenters on YouTube have expressed surprise at the fact that it’s a real Microsoft ad and not an SNL Digital Short or Tim & Eric sketch. Because it begins with a kid singing into her be-stickered laptop, I thought, oh, this ad is goofy and simple because it’s aimed at kids. But then, the dad steals her laptop to write a jingle for a line of glow-in-the-dark towels (a product that if MS marketed it might make more profits from than the one advertised here), then a “cool” rocker guy uses it to write a new tune for his band, which apparently is a Teletubbies cover group. The actors exhibit every hallmark of bad acting minus the mouthing of each others’ lines. Good lord. The video originally appeared here.

By the way, word on the streets is that if you sing someone else’s song into Songsmith, BMI and ASCAP dispatch men in flak jackets to descend onto your house from a helicopter and take you away to an island prison. Microsoft inherits all your stuff.