Songfacts®:

• As ordinary people often discover to their cost, many big companies treat the man in the street and the housewife like dirt when they complain about products and services that don't come up to scratch. One company that did, and wishes it hadn't, is United Airlines. When Canadian Country & Western artist Dave Carroll of The Sons Of Maxwell filed for compensation for his guitar which had been damaged in transit by criminally negligent baggage handlers, he received this all too typical cavalier treatment. After nine months, his response to United's response (or should that be non-response?) was to write and record "United Breaks Guitars."
• This was not a unique consumer protest - others have complained in elegant prose, in verse, and even in song before - but no company has reported a fall in its value of a hundred and eighty million dollars on account of a solitary dissatisfied customer, which is what happened after Carroll posted a video of his lyrical protest to YouTube.
  
  Too late the company relented and offered him $1200 - the cost of repairing the instrument - and $1200 in flight vouchers.
  
  Although the song - by far his biggest hit - hasn't made Carroll a mint, "United Breaks Guitars" can be said in some sense to be the most expensive song ever recorded: companies (and especially airlines) worldwide take note! >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2
• Tom Paxton had a similar experience which he recounted in his ironic protest song "Thank You, Republic Airlines." Paxton wrote the track after Republic Airlines broke the neck on his guitar in 1983. It can be found on his 1984 live album, In the Orchard and 1985's One Million Lawyers and Other Disasters.