Right, I suppose I should write with some reasonable consideration now.
On November 16th 2009, “I’ve Got Nothing” entered the charts at number 36. The song was developed, written and recorded completely through internet submissions, and was the culmination of a project that began ten weeks earlier when myself and three other YouTubers started a new YouTube channel called “Chartjackers”. The aim was to document the progress of an internet-constructed single to be released for charity. The melody, the lyrics, all of it was contributed by the online community, and we purposefully made something very cheesy, something that harks back to the days before pop took itself seriously. (The song is still available on iTunes and the money from every sale goes to Children In Need. You can see the music video here and watch the finished half-hour documentary here – the BBC filmed us on our journey).
We were aiming for number 1, but we had a number of roadblocks in our path. In my opinion, the biggest problem we had was that we relied too much on traditional media. Our internet community were amazing, getting the word ‘Chartjackers’ in the trending topics on Twitter no less than four times, emailing radio stations and DJs, but that was the thing – our show was on television. We asked traditional radio to play the song. We asked newspapers and magazines for coverage. When they turned us down we were disheartened. But we never saw that we had plenty of power all our own. Instead of using the online community to get the attention of the people that (we thought) had the real means to support us, we should have realised that we could have mobilised the internet ourselves and took over the charts without needing traditional media at all.
The Rage campaign, by contrast, is a perfect example of how it should have been done. No old media included. Nobody played Killing In The Name on the radio or on TV this week – they didn’t have to. It was never about that. If they’d emailed radio DJs and said “play Killing In The Name, get it to number 1″ – they wouldn’t have. The media are reactive. So they just did it themselves. And (perhaps ironically) enough people cared about the Rage campaign that traditional media DID start paying attention. Now, I’d argue that this is also because the “beat the X Factor” idea is much more appealing than the “let’s see what the internet can do” idea, because the former incorporates the latter – but I think there’s a lot to be learned from this.
I loved the Chartjackers project and wouldn’t change anything that happened. We didn’t get to number 1, but we DID get to number 36, we raised over ten thousand pounds for Children In Need, and now just over a month later, the internet have controlled the charts again in a much more significant way and raised even more money for charity (over sixty thousand pounds has been donated to Shelter by fans of Killing In The Name).
What I’m trying to say is that I feel like these two events are the start of something. We’re at a turning point for the music industry, where the people get more say and, in the words of Rage, won’t do what they tell us.
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