Today I celebrate the joys of product placement.

I wonder if musician guest spots on TV shows do any good. I’m talking about the sort of thing where The Shins, say, turn up playing the local bar on Gossip Girl (that hasn’t actually happened, as far as I know… it’s just a hypothetical).

One such guest spot I remember, because it combined two of my favorite things, was Aimee Mann’s appearance on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She played two songs in the background of a couple bar scenes and even got to deliver a line (“Man, I hate playing vampire towns”). But I doubt any non-Aimee Mann fans ran out to buy her album.

I bring this up because I recently saw Plain White T’s appear on the Nickelodeon show iCarly (my daughter is a fan) and was intrigued enough by their performance that I picked up a couple of their albums for a buck apiece from a bargain bin.

I haven’t listened to the albums in full yet but I did listen to the song ‘Hey There Delilah’ after seeing it mentioned in all the reviews. And it’s a hell of a good song — a simple acoustic ditty about a long-distance relationship with a charming, lovesick chorus (“Oh, I’ts what you do to me…”). It’s Beatlesesque in its simplicity (not to mention its bass line) and the sort of thing I can picture boys and girls of all ages swooning to.

So thank you, iCarly.