Thoughts on 'Bum Rush The Charts'

The results are in for the Bum Rush the Charts initiative on 22^nd March. 

The campaign was attempting to put a podsafe music aritist, Black Lab, at the top of the iTunes charts in order to send a message to the mainstream music industry from the social media community.

As a podsafe music artist myself I think this is a great initiative. 

Unfortunately the single didn’t get to the top but I hope the community doesn’t miss the big picture here just because the main goal wasn’t achieved. It was hugely successful in terms of awareness and the fact that people were motiviated ‘globally’ to do something collectively on a budget of $800. Also the organisers must have learnt heaps about staging an event like this and I’m sure they will be sharing those thoughts on the blog.

So far there have been thousands of downloads and the songs got into the Top 50 in many countries in the world.

I thought I would offer up my thoughts on the results and some suggestions about how to improve the next attempt;

• Community members participated in the event for many reasons but the main one is to be part of an experience. They wanted to take an action and then see the results of that action when they checked the iTunes Top 20. The experiential element to a campaign like this is critical

• The Financial Aid Podcast who pulled together Bum Rush The Charts is a fund raising Podcast that helps provide college fund for US students. To really harness the power of a global audience I think they should look to spilt the charity donation between this and a charity that has a more global appeal ? AIDS, WWF etc. The US angle was too esoteric.

•  Another challenge that the global nature of this initiative presents is tracking web metrics globally. I believe there was some under-reporting because some of the affiliates tags only work within US territories.

• I wondered if the campaign would have been more successful if the time period targeted was a week rather than one day. Most of the traditional music charts run for a week and given the LongTail effect this could have helped the groundwell effect.

• Do it again quickly, build on the buzz !