• November 4, 2004

Starting last week, automotive company Toyota quietly made available a free download of a song commissioned for a television branding campaign. Since then, some 2,000 visitors have downloaded the 60-second song, "Beautiful World," composed and performed by musical group Fisher, the husband-and-wife duo Kathy Fisher and Ron Wasserman, said a Toyota spokeswoman yesterday.

"Wheel," the TV ad that used the song, ran from Sept. 28 through the end of October, and will be available on the Web for an as-yet undetermined length of time, said the spokeswoman. The ad was created by Toyota's agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, which used the music company HUM to reach out to Los Angeles-area musicians and ask them to come up with music for the new campaign, dubbed "Moving Forward." Fisher was ultimately chosen from a pool of about 15 musical groups that competed to write the Moving Forward score.