Well it was only on Christmas day that I found out about the ever-so-engrossing race to Christmas number one: Jeff Buckley vs Alexandra Burke, the X-factor winner. Of course the most cursory search shows that the former, now deceased, was signed to Columbia Records whereas the latter, after her win on one of the most irritating tv programs ever conceived, was signed to Syco Records, founded by that utter cunt Simon Cowell and, according to whom, Syco accounts for 40% of the profits of its parent company Sony Music Entertainment. Guess what? It’s also the parent company of Columbia Records. So the real effect of the ‘campaign’ to preserve musical values was to whip up a huge media storm and makes lots of money for the company that depends on precisely the sort of crap pop music that the so-called campaigners saw themselves as reacting against.

I’d previously been completely oblivious to this. I’ve been lost in my own little world for pretty much the whole of december. So I just had a look on facebook. I found 44 groups of various permutations before I stopped counting: some wanted Jeff Buckley to be number 1, others wanted to stop Burke from getting to number and others were about how much superior the Buckley/Cohen songs were to Burke’s. I ignored the plethora of Buckley groups that didn’t mention the christmas number one in their title. No doubt many predated the ‘campaign’ but from my brief search it seemed the number 1 was, perhaps inevitably, the hot topic on them. The largest group has 146,279 members. The image above is from this one. There was letter writing and a ‘flash mob’. There’s also a Jeff Buckley new music group which tries to “keep the spirit of what we achieved alive” by getting recognition for artists who are deemed to be under appreciated. Like I say, it was only on Christmas day that I found about this because when some family friends came over, we ended up talking about it. This is viral marketing at its best and fuck me did it work:

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.^[1] Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.^[2] Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable.

I think at the start of this there were street teams who got paid and this is evidenced, at least in part, by the sheer quantity of groups on facebook with few members. Obviously many of these were probably the result of people hearing about the ‘campaign’ and thinking “me too”. Even so when something proliferates unsuccessfully to the extent that these groups did (i.e. most of them had under 200 members) it’s a sign of a conscious attempt to project a sense of plurality. I don’t find it particularly likely that this many people heard about the ‘campaign’, felt sufficiently moved to take part and yet were either unaware of the countless existing groups (some of which were very popular) or chose not to participate in them. This was deliberate: you start many groups in the hope that a few of them will take off.

So what was the result? Burke got christmas number 1, Buckley number 2 and Leonard Cohen’s original came in at number 36. Wonderfully Cohen is also signed to Columbia Records. Burke sold 576,000. Buckley sold 495,000 after, as the Guardian puts it, “an internet campaign masterminded by music fans who feared that Burke would desecrate Cohen’s 1984 anthem”. An internet campaign that made the people they set out to depose an awful lot of money. The phrase useful idiots comes to mind, no? It’s hard not to sneer when you read people posting on these facebook groups about how it feels “good to make a difference”.

In case anyone takes this the wrong way because I’m well aware I sneered like a mother fucker while writing this: (a) I love Jeff Buckley and think the X-factor song is a travesty (b) I’m sure people genuinely felt very strongly about this (c) the point I’m making is that it wasn’t just the internet campaign that generated this outcome for Sony, the response and awareness, even amongst those who wanted Burke to win (10 popular groups on facebook before I got bored counting) as well as the coverage of the popular ‘contest’ in the media was integral to the whole marketing strategy (d) I too think Simon Cowell is a tool.

The largest group says its campaigns is set to “make a huge statement against the barrage of cynical manufactured pop dirtying up our charts”. Surely a bigger statement would be not feeding the media strategy of the corporation involved? When I think someone is a tool I prefer not to ‘campaign’ to make them* a lot of money, even if I feel passionately about the aesthetic idea being expressed in the campaign. At the end of the day it is an aesthetic idea. This isn’t a political campaign, it was motivated by an attempt to preserve musical value against the corrosive forces of crass commercialism. In the process the energies that in a healthier democracy would have been directed towards politics and society are instead fixated on individuals expressing themselves for the stances they take re: music and culture. Maybe if we lived in that healthier democracy it would be possible to fight for aesthetic ideals without making a multinational corporation a fuck load of money in the process? I can’t help thinking from reading these groups how much sublimated desire to make a difference was expressed within them. People want to join together and do stuff. They want to fight for what’s right and good and true. It’s a sad indictment of our society and the profound evisceration of our politics that this is what that goal, in practice, amounts to.

*Or to be precise their company’s parent company with whom their business interests are deeply and irrevocably intertwined.