I try to do right, I try to do right, because I only got, only got, only got, only got…all that I have is one life to live.

These are the words that greeted viewers of the long-running ABC daytime serial One Life to Live when they tuned in for a pair of episodes last May, thanks to a remixed-and-revamped version of the show’s theme song performed by Snoop Dogg. Yes, that Snoop Dogg. You may have seen blurbs here and there about Snoop’s OLTL appearance and chalked it up to a joke, or some of the hard-hitting investigative journalism the Internet is known for, but no — Snoop really did tape a two-episode guest stint that had him rolling into the fictional Pennsylvania town of Llanview to perform at a bachelorette party. As far as musicians-on-scripted-TV crossovers go, it was both utterly ridiculous and eminently believable — of all the multiplatinum veteran rap artists in the world, who would be more likely than Snoop Dogg to take the microphone for a small club filled with screaming women in a random Philadelphia suburb? — and far less awkward than, say, the Counting Crows showing up to play in a bar during an episode of Boston Public:

As any Ricky Nelson fan could tell you, musicians have been taking advantage of television shows’ built-in audiences pretty much since the dawn of the medium. But the slow, painful death of Top 40 radio — hell, of radio in general, at least as a reliable conduit for new music — has given rise to a new breed of TV music supervisors who actively work to connect their viewers with songs and artists. One such music supervisor is One Life to Live’s Paul Glass, who has used his position with the show to help turn it into a surprisingly popular destination for musicians promoting new releases. Many of us still tend to think of daytime television as the last refuge for cheesy strings and organ music, but when Mary J. Blige booked an appearance on One Life to Live in 2006 — and enjoyed a 40% bump in sales the following week — OLTL quickly became the Ed Sullivan Show of the soaps, with Glass booking and producing a succession of artists that now includes Lifehouse, Nelly Furtado, Simply Red, Erykah Badu, Timbaland (with the loathsome OneRepublic), and, uh, Puddle of Mudd (you can’t win ‘em all). (more…)