I woke up this morning and found Black Lab at #99 on the charts. Bum Rush the Charts pushed an indie artist into the top 100 on iTunes – incredible!
I’m also getting to the final prep of my latest new project, Marketing Over Coffee – keep your ears open! It’s been a crazy week and I’m going to catch up on some sleep.
It’s strange how things all come together sometimes. For the past couple of days I have been listening to the audio presentations from the TED Conference (Mitch Joel – I will not stop until I have a beer with you at TED, and I don’t give a damn if it’s in 2037). Tony Robbins was speaking about what gives meaning to life and he broke it into 6 needs (a new Maslow, if you will). Four were base needs to survive, the upper two were spiritual – the need to grow and the need to give.
Instantly this focused the understanding of my fascination with Bum Rush the Charts. It’s a chance to grow and try to figure out the puzzle that is iTunes without being able to see behind the curtain. With the proceeds going towards a scholarship the effort has a higher meaning.
I also had two other threads weave together. Seth Godin made a lasting impact when I was listening to him months ago on Across the Sound. He refused to criticize a campaign because he said that at least the group was trying, the only people that deserved criticism were those who didn’t do anything, or took the safe route (he goes further to say that safe is the new risky). Since then I have made an effort to not criticize those who are brave enough to try something new. This echoed back to me today listening to Adam Curry on the DSC. It’s easy for people to complain, those are the people you don’t need to hang out with – spend your time with people who make an effort to do something.
So enough with the sermon – what have we learned? Rock is weak, the number 1 track in rock is number 5 overall, but it tails off quickly – only the top 12 or so tracks make it into the top 100 overall. Hip-Hop and Pop run the charts *groan*
Mine Again will continue to rise up in the charts. I’m going to put some chips down here. It appears that the track only moved once, it wasn’t on the chart and then everything moved around 11am Eastern. My theory is that the scoring is a 7-day moving average. Chris says that the landing page had over 10k hits, let’s say only half bought the track. I find it difficult to believe that more than 5,000 people bought Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on Me during the same period (and that’s hard for me to say as I believe that could be one of the 5 greatest singles of all time). Assuming there wasn’t some kind of Def Leppard the Charts going on that I didn’t know about, we’d say it was a normal day for that track and if it did beat the bum rush there would be over 2 million iPods or more with this hot track from Hysteria on it.
I think we can safely presume that the track may actually be penalized right now for squeezing all the buys into a single day (in theory the total sales today divided by the length of the measuring cycle – i.e. if it’s 7 days we are only seeing 1/7th of the total impact as the previous 6 days are much closer to zero). Check out Christopher Penn’s latest update to see if I’ve still got the J-Funk.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Tomorrow (Thursday) is Bum Rush the Charts. Here’s the story:
A bunch of us who blog, podcast and vidcast want to show that focused, relevant content is the new king. We want to see how much impact we can have on iTunes and raise some money for a good cause at the same time.
The track to buy is called “Mine Again” by Black Lab.
As all Marketeers love stats – here are the critical ones:
On a 99 cent purchase of an RIAA artist:
– 19 cents goes to Apple
– 75 cents goes to the label
– 5 cents goes to the artist
On a 99 cent purchase of Mine Again on March 22:
– 14 cents goes to Apple
– 5 cents goes to the scholarship fund directly
– 40 cents goes to the band
– 40 cents goes to the scholarship fund via Black Lab’s donation
Click here to Bum Rush The Charts and make a charitable donation.
Here’s another special for you – I’ll be gifting the track to up to 50 subscribers to The M Show insider, the email newsletter of The M Show podcast. You can sign up on the homepage of the best business podcast.
How high with the track go? Keep your feet on the ground, and your head in the stars!
“Stay on message” or “What is our messaging” are tired old marketing phrases. Spending a lot of time crafting the first paragraph of your boilerplate company description, or for your website or press release is boring stuff. I’ve been thinking more about Jordan’s Furniture and other experiences that make me want to buy one thing over another.
I stick to a high protein diet because my body doesn’t seem to handle processed flour or sugar very well. As a result I tend to get tired of eggs for breakfast 7 days a week and have a protein shake instead. I was at the local nutrition store and they were out of the magic powder I normally buy. The guy working there said I should try another brand since the one I buy is from a company that does more marketing than research and they don’t have the best reputation.
On a side note – here’s a missed opportunity. I asked if they had samples of other products and he said no, but there was a money back guarantee. Like I’m going to buy some 5-gallon pail and take the time to drive it back to the mall if it tastes like oatmeal sludge. If they just had one open and I could give it a try, I could be riding another brand now.
The young man looked like he was student-aged and I would say of average build (except now it seems that means 15 lbs. overweight), as in pretty good shape. This was at lunch near work and there’s a similar store near my home (run by a different company though). I found the massive container I needed of my fave and went up to the register. The dude working here was about 6 ft. and probably around 220lbs, and could easily crush a monkey skull with his bare hands (i.e. jacked). He asked how I liked the Syntha6 and I said it tasted good. He said he really likes the products from that company and he’d have to try it. I’m no longer concerned if I’m with the right product.
For the past 5 years I’ve had a major shift in my philosophy towards work and education. Forget being well-rounded – find one thing and do it better than anyone else. I was excited to see that Seth Godin has a new book coming out and a blog to go with it. If you are a fan, check out The Dip.
It’s Sunday and that means a new M Show…
I ran into my first Wiki Spam today. That’s my brainbuster – Spiki
Here’s why you should listen to the show: (Go there now)
M Show 142 – Massive, Clothes, Racing Against the Clock
Intro – Julien Smith from In Over Your Head
News:
Massive Running the Game
Time to look like The Economist
L.L. Bean – Web beats Stores
Boston Now – Coming soon
Ben Edelman continuing to rock the house.
Talk:
Worn out clothes
Idiocracy
Wiki Spam – Spiki?
Entertainment:
Racing Against The Clock
Support the M Show by using this link to shop at Amazon
Feedback to john@TheMShow.com
Today was one of those days where I had no events running so I was able to try and tame the paper snowbanks that had built up around my desk. I have a bad habit from a prior startup of just throwing invoices in the trash until I get a personal call or notice. Every day I say a prayer of thanks that I’m no longer in an environment like that (and of course M Show Productions, LLC pays bills realtime thanks to the miracle of PayPal and the internets).
My drive home was a disaster, snow has been falling since lunch, and unfortunately my new Garmin died on me this week so I had to ship it back for repairs. I think that BJ’s actually sold me a unit that had been returned b/c there were already some locations loaded on it. I’ve returned a bunch of stuff to BJ’s though so I thought I would cut them some slack, and it has worked fine for a month so I don’t think it has anything to do with that.
Obviously I’m rambling here after a busy week at work, have a good weekend!
-J
We ran another webinar today and there’s an interesting new feature. GoToWebinar can tell if the participant’s window is active or not. In other words, if someone is watching the webinar and they switch to another window (to surf the web or check email). A flag shows up on the presenter’s window and there’s an overall score for the percentage of people that are presumably paying attention. Pretty cool… and fun to fire off a quick IM to friendly attendees that aren’t paying attention.
Back in the dark ages (about 5 years ago), designers would still worry about 800×600 screen size. My latest logs show that’s about 2% of my traffic. We’re blowin’ it out, and that means room for Revver – hello higher quality video!
revver(119372)
