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Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Stick it to the man for only 99 cents

“Bum Rush the Charts” is further proof that some of the best marketing ideas these days come from non-marketers with passion. The passion in this case is for podcasting, which traditional media has not exactly embraced. Sure, some media outlets are producing podcasts, many simple recordings of content played on the radio, and others are delivering original content. But by and large, podcasting is contemptuously dismissed by, for instance, the Recording Industry Association of America.

The folks behind “Bum Rush the Charts” want to change that, and they want to do it all in one day—March 22. On that day, the organizers want you to go to Apple’s iTunes store and plunk down $.99 for a song by an independent artist. Not just any independent artist, or any song. They want you to buy “Mine Again” by Black Lab. Here’s the pitch:

...on March 22nd, the podcasting community is going to take an indie podsafe music artist to number one on the iTunes singles charts as a demonstration of our reach to Main Street and our purchasing power to Wall Street. The track we’ve chosen is “Mine Again” by the band Black Lab. A band, mind you, that was not just dropped from not just one, but two major record labels (Geffen and Sony/Epic) and in the process forced them to fight to get their own music back. We picked them because making them number one, even for just one day, will remind the RIAA record labels of what they turned their backs on - and who they ignore at their peril.

It helps that Black Lab is a terrific band and “Mine Again” is a fine track. But for $.99, I’d support this effort if I hated the band and the track made me cringe. You don’t have to listen to the track, after all. You just have to spend a penny shy of a buck to stand up and make a statement.

To make it even more enticing, the “Bum Rush the Charts” folks have arranged for the commission on every sale to be donated to college scholarships, “partly because it’s a worthy cause, but also partly because college students are among the most misunderstood and underestimated groups of people by big media.”

There’s a PDF version of a flyer you can print out and pin to your wall to remind you or to give to someone else. Heck, become a one-person street team and hand them out on a corner somewhere. I’m fully behind this effort, and impressed as hell that it didn’t take a Leo Burnett or Burson Marstellar to come up with it.

Hat tip to P.W. Fenton who alerted me to the Bum Rush on his wonderful podcast, Digital Flotsam. In fact, I’m going to get PeeDub’s permission to play that segment on For Immediate Release.