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Facebook Campaign Decides UK Christmas Music Charts
uglyduckling writes "A grassroots Facebook campaign has pushed the 1990s Rage Against the Machine song 'Killing in the Name Of' to the top of the British music charts for Christmas. The campaign was planned to prevent the X-Factor winner from charting Christmas number one, as has been the case for the past four years. It was supposedly a kick against the commercialism of Christmas and commercial dominance in the music scene, although Rage and the X-Factor winner Joe McElderry were actually signed to the same label. Despite this minor detail, it's interesting to note that this is the first song to reach the number one spot through downloads alone in the UK, and is a testament to the organizational power of social networking sites like Facebook. The Facebook group also asked for donations to charity, and has raised £70,000 for the homeless charity Shelter."
And RATM are giving the proceeds to Shelter too, good for them:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8423340.stm
It was radio 5, not radio 1
- Tom Morello via Wikipedia
it's interesting to note that this is the first song to reach the number one spot through downloads alone in the UK
Umm, no it isn't. Crazy by Gnarles Barkley was the first song to reach number one in the UK on downloads alone. This was the first song to be the Christmas number 1 on downloads alone.
Amazon.co.uk sold both downloads as loss leaders. The 40p limit applies to the wholesale price, not the retail price.
- I pay Amazon 29p
- Amazon pays Sony 40p (or more?)
- It counts towards the chart
- Amazon hopes my retail experience was good, and I'll come back for more music downloads in future. This time at a profitable price.
Everybody's happy.
When Killing In The Name Of came out in 1992 there was, of course, no iTunes or any interwebsnet distribution channel. You had to have a label for your record to be heard, which at that time was Epic. As guitarist Tom Morello said "Epic agreed to everything we asked -- and they've followed through.... We never saw a conflict as long as we maintained creative control." Like Jane's Addiction four or so years before, the material was so strong that the bidding war between labels was that fierce that the band were able to lay down their own terms. Very few bands even of strongest principles against mass commercialisation were able to avoid a major label at that time. Even Chuck D allowed himself to be talked into Public Enemy being on a major label for several albums. Its only the democratisation of digital downloads, internet publicity and all that that has made it possible to bust that old model. A lot has changed in 17 years.
Some interesting things about that site:
* It was not set up by the same people who set up the main facebook campaign group
* It was set up after the campaign became popular and got coverage in the mainstream media
* It is not linked to from the main facebook group
* It does not link to the main facebook group (it links to its own facebook page, which is inactive in comparison to the actual campaig group)
* It seems to exist only to sell t-shirts (10% to charity but I bet they still make a profit)
I see no evidence that this has anything to do with the main facebook campaign and plenty that hints that it is just someone's attempt to cash in. If that is the case then it doesn't suprise me that someone who used to work with Simon Cowell is involved.