Rage Against the Machine
The Number One Christmas Single on the UK music charts always receives a lot of attention, but this year there was extra drama thrown into the mix. For the past four years the Christmas Number One have been winners from the Simon Cowell’s UK singing talent competition The X Factor. This year, however, UK rock fan Jon Morter was determined to strike a blow in defense of rock and against the manufactured pop star phenomenon. He created a grassroots campaign to sell more copies of a song and block a fifth straight win for The X Factor factory by. Morter chose 90s hard-rock band Rage Against the Machine and their controversial 1992 track ’Killing In The Name ‘.
When all the sales were complied, Killing In The Name sales totaled 500,000 copies while Joe McElderry’s The Climb trailed behind with sales of 450,000. Killing in the Name was not available as a CD single and became the first download-only Christmas number one, as well as the biggest download sales total in a song’s first week in the charts.
Rage Against the X-Factor (as the campaign became dubbed) has been triumphed by some as an example of the power of social networks over the traditional media powers-that-be. After all, the The Climb hit had a hit TV show, a huge marketing campaign behind it with deep in-store discounts bringing the price down to as little as 30p in some stores. Killing in the Name had no budget, one passionate individual with a noble goal. It just so happens that Morter was not alone in his frustration with The X Factor and the Facebook group began to attract hundreds, then thousands of members (the group now boasts over one million members). The cause quickly spread throughout other social networks such as Twitter, Bebo and MySpace.
There are several factors that came together to help make this campaign successful: an interesting cause (if given the chance, who wouldn’t want to cause even a small measure of grief to Simon Cowell); an easy conversion (simply buy Killing in the Name at the UK iTunes store), and good old Word-of-Mouth. The rest took care of itself as mainstream media caught wind of the campaign and it was features in newspapers and on TV across the UK.
One week later, Killing in the Name dropped to #40 and Joe McAlderry moved up a spot to #1 anyway – Sony may have been the big winner, as both artists are distributed by the media company.
So, has anything changed? Was this really a triumph of social media, or simply a coincidence? Could this have happened without Facebook, Twitter and other high profile social networking platforms? Sure, in the past hit songs have become hits regionally then went on to become national and international hits – but they took months, sometime years to achieve this. The Rage Against the X-Factor campaign took just a few weeks. Things can happen fast in the online world, use that speed and efficiency to your advantage, be aware or your brand could be blindsided.
Photo credit:http://www.flickr.com/photos/penner/ / CC BY-SA 2.0