Rage Against The Media
In shock comedy value, plastic prince of pop Simon Cowell had the UK’s Christmas #1 rated record taken away from him at the hands of two Facebook fans who started a campaign for Rage Against The Machine to take said crown instead. With mucho Social Media punditry to follow, Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge deconstruct the hype to see what actually happened.
40 Comments to “Rage Against The Media”
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Ah, but would Joe have sold 500K copies, if RATM wasn’t there? I suspect a lot of Joe’s copies where bought to try to make sure he got to number one. So Simon may not have got the #1 but he sold an extra 200,000 records out of it, so did he really lose? Big business always wins in the end, sadly…
As we said in the show, from a sales perspective, no-one really lost: Joe and Rage sold a shit load of records, their labels made money, so did Cowell.
The real blow here in many ways is one of validation: it validated that people are sick to the back teeth of X Factor, and I am sure that was a tougher pill for Cowell to swallow.
Well, the posers kind of have a point this time, don’t they? Aren’t rage against the machine just as much a part of the mainstream of pop music as Whats-His-Name off the X-Factor? I have had the dubious privilege of seeing RATM live, back in 2001, these are a bunch of twats going around doing stadium tours and not even putting in much in the way of effort to make the show worth the money. On the plus side, they were supported by Asian Dub Foundation, who went some way towards making me not want to rip up a seat and chuck it at them.
The choice between the cocks of stadium rock and Cowell’s stable of simpering tween pin ups is one of taste, not some grand political statement. If they’d wanted to make an actual point, then perhaps they could have got everyone to buy some edgy but largely unknown 1930’s Jazz number. That’d make record execs sit up and take notice, plus I’m sure you could find some lyrics that make morning DJs squirm.
Chris, calling RATM stadium rock is a little unfair. Admittedly they may be victims of their own success, but despite their size they have continued to be a band with a protest/political agend which I think is what made them seem like a likely rallying point.
Also the actual song did express the right tone of anger that the campaign needed.
There were other campaigns for edgier smaller groups but at the end of the day you needed something vaugly popular to get peoples attention.
Also very importantly RATM song was a piece of original music by a real band, and the other thing was yet-another-cover popped out of a mass produced jelly mould.
This was great! Facebook just gave a platform to organize a protest which was what made this work.
@sil, did you miss the fact that #iran was a trending topic on twitter for months on end, and very much upset the Iranian authorities?
I didn’t miss it; tbh, I think that that supports my contention that social media is really good at getting support for a cause if the cause doesn’t require much effort on the part of the supporters. Retweeting #iran posts shows your support and doesn’t require doing very much, so it’s ideal, in much the same way that #ratm4xmas was. If Twitter had encouraged lots of people to march on the Iranian embassy…that’d be different.
I thought RATM broke up before 2001?
But then again, the band chemistry was probably crap during that period anyways.
“I cannot stand Pop Music, I loathe the misty soft focus lensed videos, whitewashed teeth, carefully quaffed hair, mundane, unoriginal, saccharin sweetened shite that constitutes alledged ‘music’”
*Must buy Mr. Bacon a drink.
Not going to disagree.
Oh yeah!
I also hate pop music, its to simple, repetitive and predictable, nether do I give a shit about X-Factor.
What I don’t understand is how one person on a site as busy as Facebook could actually be noticed by such a large number of other users.
That’s the network effect for you, though. “If everyone tells two people”, etc…
But it must also take some large amount of luck to actually start such a cascade. The amount of junk posted on sites like facebook and twitter is overwhelming.
I find it disheartening that a million people can join a facebook group and change the Christmas number 1, but when a million people marched to London to say no war in Iraq, it fell on deaf ears. Especially considering the difference in the amount involved.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2765041.stm
Also, you may find this site amusing:
http://wisdomofcameron.com/
You find it disheartening, but do you find it surprising?
Also, it is hardly a problem that motivating half a million people to vote in a popularity contest (which is what the charts are) means that they win that popularity contest. The ratm4xmas group didn’t change anyone’s mind; in particular, as Jono says, no-one who wanted to buy The Climb and see Joe McWhatever get the Christmas Number One was convinced by ratm4xmas to instead buy Killing In The Name. What it did was brought half a million new voters into the popularity contest who otherwise would not have participated at all. Marching against the war didn’t do that precisely because the million people on the streets didn’t get a vote on whether to go to war or not; the 645 MPs get that vote, and the populace doesn’t. If the Christmas Number One was chosen by Gallup rather than by purchases, then a half-million-strong Facebook group wouldn’t have made any difference there either.
Exactly: it is like comparing apples and oranges – a popularity contest based on record sales and cultural and political change in a country.
Not particularly surprising, no. I guess the thought was provoked by you raising the question of whether a similar grassroots action could be applied to more important things, such as politics.
I guess what I mean to say is, wouldn’t it be nice if the power that social media gave people to change the Christmas number 1, could also empower people to effect real political change.
Yeah, it would be nice. Part of what I think we were getting at when complaining about the social media dorks was precisely that this was being presented as such: “Look what the power of Facebook and social media can do!” (i.e., effect genuine social change) when what’s actually being demonstrated is “Look what the power of Facebook and social media can do!” (i.e., make 500,000 people click on a link), and trying to establish the former while only having evidence for the latter.
There is actually already a word coined for what is being described here and it is “slacktivism”. It is more or less defined as “doing something really easy to support a cause when in fact you are not really motivated enough to do something that requires real effort”.
For example a repressive regime might be initially worried id 500k people joined a Facebook group “we are opposed to the repressive regime”. If they think that if only <1% of these people were to get involved in traditional activism like marching to the city centre and risking arrest they would have a huge civil unrest problem. However, in reality they don’t need to worry at all because the number of slacktivists who will join the Facebook page bears no relationship with the number of people who are motivated enough take the risk of getting involved in real activism.
On the other hand if you are a famous golf player, you should probably get very worried if 500k people join a Facebook group saying “I am disgusted by the behaviour of player X”. The owners of the brands who sponsor player X will rightly guess that a significant portion of the slacktivists who join this group will be motivated to switch away from the brands endorsed by player X (because in this case roughly the same amount of commitment to the cause is required).
That should read “amount of effort involved”, sorry.
I read on the internet somewhere (so read in to that what you will) that RATM are signed to the same record label that Simon ‘high-pants’ Cowell represents. A win-win situation for Mr Scowl then :/
Music/Internet-Fact(?) #2
Duran Duran have a significant fan base that whenever a radio station asks for votes for top 80’s bands and/or songs, the Duranies are able to use the i/web to get enough votes to get their favoroute songs onto that particular chart.
Thats really interesting: its pretty cool how bands are uniting their fans together around these sorts of things.
The real winners in this were Sony International, they own both the record companies involved so they really couldn’t give a shit which song people bought. It was all good for them. As somebody pointed out earlier, big business always wins in the end. We’d all like to think that Simon Cowell was upset over this, mainly because he’s a 5 star dickhead, but the truth is he was laughing all the way to the bank like the rest of them. I have a feeling we’ll see record companies secretly starting these campaigns to fuel sales in future.
Tom Morrello is giving away some of the money he personally receives from this whole thing to UK charities. At least somebody has the right perspective. I am a fan of Rage and “Killing In The Name Of” is a killer song, excuse the pun. But if anyone thinks they changed the world by buying this song they’re sadly mistaken. If only it were that easy. It all reminds me of Iron Maiden beating Cliff Richard to no 1 with “Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter” back in the 80’s. They had to play it on Top Of The Pops as well, classic.
As we already said in the shot, in many ways the fact that Sony own the records is not the point: the point is the expression of feeling towards a dominant media entity in the form of Simon Cowell, and the relatively generic music that comes out of the machine.
I don’t think RATM “deserved” Christmas number 1, but I think that everyone who bought the record deserved to get it to number 1.
Aq is 100% correct. This was never about money, or record companies. It’s about showing a) that we’re fed up with shit music in the charts and b) that online communities are a very powerful way of uniting people behind a common cause (and winning).
Listening to Killing in the Name being played on the Radio 1 Chart show made me feel like Andy Dufresne listening to opera in the warden’s office. Just for a while, we were in control.
Marx last paragraph? I know exactly what you mean brother
I think it’s a shame that it was a 17 year old song, and not something from a young unheard-of band.
If anything, this shows the power of social media. If Cowbell wishes to get his way in the future, he will need to harness that power. The? Is, can he.
Indeed. It will be interesting to see how he embraces Social Media. Getting one up on X Factor by using a new medium is one thing, but when he uses the medium, that will be pretty interesting to watch.
Yeah, but Simon will only use it for evil.
I absolutely love this initiative and was thrilled when I heard about it a couple of weeks ago. Being a RATM fan for a long time just made this victory against “top 40 pop” so much sweeter. While it won’t convert any listeners it upsets the charts and if there’s something that pop-music lovers follows it’s top charts.
To the nay sayers: RATM, while being a big label band nowadays, was the right choice for this protest, imho. Their freedom fighting agenda has always been genuine and not a marketing stunt. Zach is an activist since long and the band featured monthly “freedom fighters” on the band page for a long time. It is not just about cussing in the mic and do mosh pits with agitated teens as some ppl seem to think.
Also, while RATM is on the Sony label it does not mean that they agree with Sony’s methods. This is an old article from the Napster days (http://www.livedaily.com/news/2346.html) where RATM “raged” against Sony for hunting down their fans and both made them drop the bans and gave the community free music via their site to show that they disagree with their methods.
So while it might look like RATM is “just another Sony product” benefiting from this battle, the story of RATM differs quite a bit from most other Sony label properties.
Just my thought.
What the Internet and social media bring are reach and speed of communication, that’s what enabled the campaign to work, where pre-internet it would most likely not be possible. Other classic examples of Internet/NewMedia campaigns that had a large and speedy impact were the #WeLoveTheNHS and #Trafigura Twitter tag outbursts. Both of these were more significant and in my opinion more worthy of debate here than X Factor at Christmas. http://www.politics.co.uk/news/culture-media-and-sport/guardian-gagging-order-sparks-twitter-frenzy-$1333687.htm http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/uk/pm-and-wife-join-welovethenhs-twitter-campaign-$1318623.htm
I disagree. Well, I don’t disagree about those campaigns existing, but I do disagree that Trafigura and WeLoveTheNHS undermine the point. The Trafigura one was a perfect example of mobilising the masses to do nothing more than click a link; the beauty of that was that the goal was precisely just to get the word out and not to actually affect any change beyond that. Has the practice of superinjunctions been stopped by this technique? Not as far as I can see. It’s similar to the anti-sweatshop campaign mounted against Nike in the 90s; it didn’t change the general practice, just Nike specifically, and to that end specific targeted anti-company campaigns are now recommended against. Similarly with WeLoveTheNHS; it didn’t actually effect any change, because it wasn’t a campaign against anything in particular; it was against Americans who condemned the NHS, who have no power to affect it. At least ratm4xmas actually got a different song to number one. I am wildly, wildly sceptical about the power of social media to actually effect change rather than just pull together a list of people to costlessly say “I agree”. Someone does #WeLoveNHSFreePrescriptionsForEverybody and the government listens, then I’ll be impressed.
In 2000, Without an internet campaign, Bob the Builder, took Christmas No 1 single with over a million sold. “Can we Fix it” held No 1 for 3 weeks. 2000 is pre-X-Factor, but I thought it was funny.
I don’t think social media is limited to the movements which require costless sacrifice, “click the link to show support”. The cost people are willing to pay is dependent on the merits of the cause, not the medium by which the cause is communicated. It will help smaller movements get communicated where they otherwise wouldn’t have and will allow a movement to circumvent an authority who controls the distribution channels, as seen with #iran.
The funny display is a victory for social media because it shows that not only can it get the word out cheaply, but it also organizes individuals into a group. The most important step in creating a movement is realizing “I am not alone, others feel like I do”. Which will validate the movement and get things rolling. While those qualities might not be unique to social media, Usenet (as was mentioned) etc. The number of people touched by this force, through “face-twitter”, has never been larger.
I think that reality tv is a platform now to become well known enough to get their music out there. It is a business to get into. Its a different time in music than the good old days of cds and tapes pre-internet. So im a supporter of the idea behind the American idol thing and the XFactor thing. Social media is the present technology its a fantastic platform to get your word out through word of mouth. The viral web is something that spreads around country to country without border security getting in the way
The problem with social media is the exact same as the benefit. It can be bad thing to allow dumb 12 year olds, crazies and people who protest just for the fuck of it to have a high platform to broadcast their views because it leads to an air of divisiveness that may not be the case.
OW!!!!!
I think Aq burst my eardrums as soon as I clicked play.
I like alternative music, I hate the X-Factor. But I didn’t see the point behind it, after all, what was it intended to do, just piss off someone with a reputation for high trousers? Sure, we brand ourselves as a nation of bullies. Make people more aware that “alternative” music is out there, and another option than the crap that the music industry comes out with and have the balls to call “Music”? Didn’t Lordi do that in 2006?
I’d have been behind the cause, however, if it had been something like (just pulling a name out the air here Jono, don’t get too excited) Severed Fifth, or some other “Open Licence” music. This would have been a better message to send out, rather than the rather lackluster message that was sent.
Wins the prize for “most disdain ever in a podcast intro”. ‘….cover of Miley Cyrus’s song from Hannah Montana…’ Hilarious.
Loved the intro, and it’s totally true.
Remember, the revolution depends on the proles…
That’s precisely the thing that I’m describing. Didn’t know it had a name, though. “Slacktivism”, huh? Good word.