Bum Rush the Charts Is Viral Activism

We’ve seen civil disobedience, petitions, letter-writing and phone campaigns, boycotts, street theatre, peaceful and violent protests, parades, marches, ribbon-tying, bumper stickering, chanting, singing, hunger strikes and get-out-the-vote drives.

Now we’re seeing a Buy In, the commercial equivalent of text messaging your vote for your favourite Idol singer.

It’s Bum Rush the Charts, and it’s an online expression of freedom from the cookie-cutter marketing and command-and-control distribution methods of the music industry.

Following up on my post yesterday about the tactics of this word of mouth campaign, Nathan Gilliatt is trying to come up with a name for what the Bum Rush the Charts folks are doing: Distributed viral social media spam.

“I’m not quite sure what to call this. It’s not exactly spam, since the participants don’t benefit directly. The effort is apparently transparent, and it doesn’t ask anyone to do anything improper. It’s an effort to coordinate votes and buying behavior.

“So, what is this? Consumer-generated spam? Distributed social media marketing? Viral activism? It’s not just word-of-mouth marketing, because of the goal of gaming the ranking systems.

“This is a slick idea, and I agree that others will try it. And while I’ve used the language of some very undesirable behavior to understand it, I don’t see anything particularly wrong with it. BRTC may be manipulating outcomes, but they’re going in through the front door.”

Will this have more significance than the buzz around Snakes on a Plane? I suspect so. If nothing else, it has encouraged some like-minded podcasters and bloggers to think of themselves as part of a movement.

I don’t think a weekly Bum Rush will happen. You can imagine the spam-fest that would result from different groups trying to get their favourite artist named Buy of the Week. It’s just not very sustainable.

But the tools are already in place, with various podsafe music sites, for bloggers, podcasters and their audiences to continue to exert their influence on what music people listen to, how it’s distributed, and how artists are compensated for their work.

Today’s gesture of indifference to corporate music marketing is a continuation of the battle against the large music companies, and their inability to make a wide range of music available in the unshackled digital format that music fans want.

Tomorrow, the music companies will carry on with their attempts to homogenize people’s tastes in music and to limit customers’ ability to transfer music to whatever device they want to use for playing music.

Like all big protest movements before it, the citizen-led campaign to return control of music to the musicians and their fans is a multi-year fight that will have setbacks.

The extensive use of social media tools to coordinate activities is an interesting development in the ongoing music rights wars. The better average music listeners get at exerting influence on the marketing and distribution of music, the more hope there is that citizen-generated methods of promoting music will become the new normal for at least part of the music industry.

Amen. And hey, don’t forget to Bum Rush the Charts.

Tags: brtc, bumrushthecharts, blacklab, music, protest, promotions, wom, viral activism