A piece by Ben Worthen in the WJS ($), in discussing the launch of Windows 95 twelve years ago, says:

MSWindows 95 was a cultural event. Thousands of tech enthusiasts waited in midnight lines so they could be the first to get their hands on a copy. And as impossible as it now sounds, Windows 95 was the first time that the Rolling Stones let one of their songs be used in an ad campaign. (Yes, Microsoft got the Rolling Stones to sell out.) Microsoft was the hot tech company, the young buck challenging IBM’s establishment.

Emphasis added. It is impossible. In the early 1990s there was a Budweiser ad that used “Wild Horses,” as sung by the Sundays; besides that, the Stones themselves appeared in Budweiser ads around the time of what must have been their 1994 tour; splitting hairs in interviews, Mick Jagger argued that the ads were advertising the tour, not the beer. That’s not how they came across on the air.

Right now, of course, you can hear the Stones’ “I’m Free” being used for Chase credit card ads. I was wandering the web, trying to make sure it wasn’t true, as some blog poster said, that the Chase commercial featured a cover of the song by the Soup Dragons. Wikipedia says it’s the Stones, which may or may not be true, but put the info like this: “In 2007, it was also used as a jingle to the Chase Freedom credit card advertisement.” I think it should say, without using a passive-voice construction that obscures the real issue, “In 2007, the Stones sold the song to be used in a credit-card commercial.” *

Gee, maybe I should make my case on the Wikipedia discussion board!

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was this:

* The band’s former manager, Allan B. Klein, has effective control of most of the Rolling Stones’s early recordings; I assume, but don’t know for sure, that to use a song in a commercial, publishing rights (which is to say the songwriters’) need to be obtained as well. Will research and report back.