Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.
So Rage Against the Machine made Christmas number one ahead of the X factor winner - should that have a capital ‘F’, I’m not sure. Horay for music in general I say, better an old classic holding the top spot than an unproven guy who from what I’ve heard hasn’t even written anything of his own - not to mention what it sounds like.
With sales of 500,000 to it’s name Killing in the Name beat Joe McElderry’s by 50,000 apparently [1], that’s a lot of downloads from lets face it, people who already own the song. There is a funny bit in the bbc article that Charlie pointed out where they are trying to say that the bad weather may have stopped people buying the X factor single - but there wasn’t a Rage single out - and it wouldn’t have stopped downloads. There’s also a “great” piece about the track here. What does this say other than half a million people in Britain are up for a laugh?
Well I think it does say something, the other day there was the news that people were still downloading music illegally and that all the legal services hadn’t made a huge dent in this activity. Perhaps this is because music isn’t what it once was and people want to buy decent music? Who want’s to pay premium prices for music that they either already own or know is years old? With the loss of Woolworths and Virgin/Zavvi from the UK highstreet there aren’t that many places to pick up older music other than HMV which I wouldn’t class as cheap in any reality.
Give people the justification to buy music and they will - people aren’t afraid to use the music services, as we’ve seen here, it’s just that the content isn’t great or isn’t value for money - I think the second point is the more likely. I think that the music industry needs to turn into more of a mass market, more for less you might say. Or it might all just be a lot of people hate Simon Cowell. It’ll also give the Daily Mail something to rant about.
Good Hunting
[1] Rage Against the Machine beat X Factor winner in charts, BBC
I bought a copy of Killing in the Name Of myself (despite already owning the album on CD), and one of the reasons I did was that it was very cheap. Amazon had it for 29p, which I think is actually less than it would have cost to cast a vote in the X Factor competition.
Flat pricing on MP3s is a missed opportunity, because there’s lots of back-catalogue stuff that I’d love to have in my collection, but that is priced like it’s a current release. Rage Against the Machine’s first album has been around for nearly 20 years, and pretty much anyone who wants a copy now owns one. Pricing it keenly is a win-win, because people who are less enamoured of it can still get a song that they like somewhat, and the artist and label make additional revenue. It looks like variable pricing is starting to make headway in the online music world, but it’s still in its infancy, and I think a lot of money is being left on the table.