Social Machinery

Since some weeks ago, the music industry looks quite busy due to Christmas single charts competition. In UK, for the last four years the Christmas number one position in the UK Singles Chart has been occupied by the winner of The X Factor TV show. But this year things were different for the successful talent hunting show. 

But once again, social networking managed to change the rules of the game in the music industry and driven by thousands of downloads and Facebook group campaigning  “Killing in the name” reached number one UK single chart list again.

 In early December, Jon and Tracy Morter launched a group on Facebook encouraging people to buy Race against the Machine’s song “Killing in the name ” in order to prevent the winner of the The X Factor TV show from achieving the number one position in UK singles chart.  And history has been made for this Christmas top singles UK chart:  driven by a large amount of social networking users, “Killing in the Name” is currently Christmas Number One song and the Facebook group reached more than 900,000 members. “Killing in the name” managed to sell over 500,000 copies, as of December 20th .Also is the first exclusively download-only single to hit number one and the fastest selling download single ever in UK.

 The ‘Rage against the X Factor’ group has been the most used Facebook group this week. Nevertheless, is not the first Facebook group to affect UK Single charts this year. The second most successful Facebook campaign for Christmas number 1 was that of fans of ‘Don’t stop believing’ by  Journey. The track has re-entered the chart once again and at a brand new peak of number 9. The other Facebook campaigns resulted in a number 14 place for George Michael’s ‘December song’ and a number 32 place for Queen and The Muppets ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

 Race against the machine’s singer, Zack de la Rocha and guitarist, Tom Morello, have supported this campaign as a way to protest against the stereotyped, super-sweet and “plastic” songs that always reach number one in UK for this time of the year. According to them, this campaign gives a “wonderful dose of anarchy” to Christmas time.  Alongside the group, a JustGiving page was created to raise money for UK homeless charity Shelter which, as of 20 December, was reported to have raised over USD 100.00

 Surprisingly, musicians like Dave Grohl, Liam Howlett, Sir Paul McCartney, The Prodigy and the band Muse have given their support for the campaign. In the other side, the famous creator of The X Factor, Simon Cowell, publicly denounced the campaign as “stupid” and “cynical”. 

Ironically, both The X Factor and Rage against the Machine are part of Sony BMG catalogue, therefore the “anarchist flavor” about this campaign sounds a little bit vague.