“if the charity ££ is the big win, why is it #ratm4xmas not #shelter4xmas. Maybe ‘give to the homeless not rock stars’ wasn’t catchy enough?”

what did I mean by that? Well, time after time, I’ve been told that the money raised for shelter means that knocking the RATM campaign makes me some kind of party-pooper, trying to stop people giving to charities.

So let’s do some sums – 750,000 in the facebook group, and according to one article I read, £21K has been donated to Shelter (the designated charity).

So that’s 21K/750K – just under 3p per person.

Assuming half the people in the group buy the single at about 79p a pop (99p on iTunes just now, apparently) – that’s, what? about 50p per purchase ending up in Sony’s coffers? so roughly 25p per person in the FB group.

Approx 10 times as much going to Sony as is going to charity.

So why wasn’t the campaign to give to homeless charities instead of buying crap pop music?

Because the Shelter thing is an afterthought. A laudable afterthought, for sure, but tagging a charity onto the end of a bogus idea doesn’t make it less bogus. 3p per person in a ‘charity campaign’ would be a MASSIVE fail.

So, if you want to give to shelter, do it because they deserve it, not because of some shitty campaign to pit rock stars against pop stars.

you’ve kind of hit right on the initial draft I wrote of this blog post – my angle was about how easy it is to mobilize masses of people to make token gestures online in favour of pretty much anything. It’s how spam works – you only need tiny percentages of the millions of people who look at a website to click through the adverts to make money.

That low bar to mobilization is a wonderful thing, but it also means that a whole load of completely half-baked ‘protests’ take place. The Jan Moir situation is one such campaign – she wrote a hideous, odious piece of insinuating crap about Stephen Gateley and the wrath of the internetz was brought down upon her with great vengeance. Vengeance UTTERLY disproportionate to how much more rancid her writing is than just about everything else the mail ever publishes.

At the same time, a bloke pulled together an incredible archive of sensationalist newspaper headlines, lies told by the red-tops about immigration. Utter lies. Far far more pernicious and damaging (given the election of BNP candidates) than Moir. What happened? A lot of people read it. We ‘raised awareness’. And then? Nothing. Why? Because it didn’t involve lambasting a homophobe on twitter, it required a much longer, more involved response, a change in buying patterns, the need to talk to family members about the lies they were reading on a daily basis.

I’m sure loads of those important conversations go on, but it’s not the stuff of high profile web campaigns.

Setting up a hashtag and a chip-in account takes minutes. Seconds, even. The idea that some kind of protest vote be registered against X-Factor is laudable. I despise the ground the Cowell walks on. But getting RATM to number one over christmas does nothing. It doesn’t say anything meaningful, it’s pointlessly antagonistic (though I’m sure there’ll be a radio edit – without the play out – that gets played, if radio deems it worthy of broadcast given the way it will end up in the charts…) and is trivializing to the original intent of the song – about something FAR more worrying that narcissistic karaoke singers having their lives destroyed by the Boyle-effect.

If you want to make a difference, support the people who will continue to make a difference.

Epic/Sony aren’t those people. If they gave RATM what they wanted in their deal, they did it because it made financial/marketing sense to them to do it. They’re are part of the problem, not the solution. If RATM managed to make it work they are the exception that proves the rule.

Visit http://www.axisofjustice.org and find out about the things that really concern Zach and Tom Morello.

If you want to make a difference to music, support independent artists.

• Boycott the mainstream altogether.
• Buy music of any stripe because you love it
• pay for it as close to source as possible
• start a blog promoting lesser known music worthy of acclaim
• organise house concerts

By all means buy Killing In The Name – it’s a great song from a great album by a massively important and influential band. But don’t pretend it means anything to get it into a chart that stopped having any significance over a decade ago.

The points about futility as Sony gets all the money and Simon Cowell is laughing all the way to his already overstuffed bank are well made. If we want to give to charity we can do so very easily. But a bit of me still says “hang on”.

In defence of #RATM4XMAS then, I propose that it is a good thing that a group of very unconnected individuals get together through word of mouth/hashtag/facebook to say to whoever cares to listen that there is an alternative to mainstream processed pop, even if it is old mainstream rock? I was persuaded when I saw the lsits of my friends joining the facebook group – these are people who are entirely unconnected but are coming together to support a “cause”. I see that 600,000 people have signed up – that’s about 1% of the UK population – and it means that someone who has been following x-factor might just broaden their listening horizons to what I would still term as less processed music. RATM were an indie band, and were very picky about which major label to use in getting their music out to the masses (“Epic agreed to everything we asked — and they’ve followed through…. We never saw a[n] [ideological] conflict as long as we maintained creative control.” – Wikipedia[7])

RATM are a great band, and I would buy the single because I don’t have a copy of it at present (gave my CD away to a more deserving teenager in need of a musical education), and because they stand up for musical integrity – no autotune, no beat detective, just some very good players.

If a group of people can mobilise themselves out of nothing to unite behind a cause that is at least superficially worthy and raising a small amount of cash for charity then surely that’s cause for some (christmas) cheer?

This is a GREAT way to support genuine independent music, to invest in the future of artists making music that matters.

If Radio one feels their listeners won’t like a particular song, they aren’t going to suddenly play it. and if they do think it’s appropriate, then where’s the radicalism in that?

The points you raise about discovery mechanisms are really good, and worthy of discussion and consideration. I fell in love with Crazy by Gnarls Barkley after hearing it on an advert. It’s the only ‘new’ song I’ve ever bought on iTunes.

Much to chew on for another post