Thanks to a colleague with a personal blog here (really good, especially if you like indie music), I took a look at a CBC report of a blogging campaign targeted at pushing the song of an independent band to the top of the iTunes charts, bypassing the major record labels. The campaign -- called Bum Rush the Charts -- asks people to purchase a copy of the song Mine Again, by the alt-rock band Black Lab, at the iTunes Store on March 22nd.
Says podcaster Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, the campaign organizer, "Taking an artist like Black Lab and making them No. 1 on the [iTunes] charts would be making a statement. It would be like giving the music industry the finger.” On Nemcoff's blog (here), he describes the motivation behind the campaign as creating a social movement: "Podcasting gets little respect from traditional media. To them we're little more than a joke, than amateurs. What they don't understand is that podcasting is more than just a delivery mechanism - it's a social movement."
Since I'm personally (let me tell you about my background sometime) and professionally (our clients can sometimes be the benefactors or objects of these campaigns) fascinated with the potential of such social movements finding a home online, I will be watching to see how viral this becomes. Stay tuned.
Recent Comments