Dan Bull's Free Single Hits The Charts

from the not-bad dept

Last week we wrote about Dan Bull’s experiment to release a song, “Sharing is Caring” for free via The Pirate Bay (and other sites) and to see if he could still get it to show up in various charts. As we discussed, it definitely was making its way onto the lists of Amazon UK’s top hip hop sales. And, on Sunday, the official UK charts came out — with Sharing is Caring coming in at number 9 on the Indie singles chart and number 35 on the RnB singles chart.

In both cases, “Sharing is Caring” was the top new entrant on both of those charts. While some will say that not making the pop charts suggests this was a failure, it sure looks like a ton of folks were happy to support Dan’s effort. As for the US charts, those have a weighted system that includes radio airplay, meaning that there’s simply no way Dan could get listed, because he’s not going to play the payola game to get on the air. Either way, it was a great experiment, and a job well done by Dan.

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Companies: the pirate bay

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Comments on “Dan Bull's Free Single Hits The Charts”

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35 Comments
That One Guy (profile) says:

As long as I’m going to be banging my head against a wall, may as well play village idiot here for a bit and beat the trolls to posting. Let’s see how many shill ‘points’ I can rack up…

Just like Marcus to completely miss the point. And btw I’m still waiting for you to publicly post every detail of your life and job to establish your credentials, and until you do I’m just going to ignore everything you say.

But see, none of that actually counts, because he’s completely skipped out on posting on Authorized channels!

Obviously since he didn’t go the smart route and signed up to get his music distributed by (whoever is in place of the RIAA over there) his music is completely terrible, since everyone knows if you’re signed up to a major label that means you’re a good musician!

The only possible way he could have gotten that high up on his own was having a bunch of pirate freetards just downloading the file multiple times, and since they probably used Big Search to find it Google is once more encouraging people to steal from artists.

(I take it back, that was actually kinda fun, though still made my head hurt to read it after)

That One Guy (profile) says:

Re:

Cushy, tie-dyed foam on that section of the wall. The idea is to replace the stupid with some random crazy.

Without the padding, and reading all the usual shills on this site, as well as the ‘brilliant’ business decisions made by the RIAA/MPAA/other ‘entertainment’ overlords, I’d have knocked holes in every inch of my wall long before now…

Anonymous Coward says:

luckily Dan ran his trial when he did. with the UK High Court issuing the ruling to force ISPs to block TPB, he may well not have had such a success. considering a reason behind the ruling was

‘Sites like The Pirate Bay destroy jobs in the UK and undermine investment in new British artists’,

makes you wonder how the hell Dan and others ever make any money at all! a better comment would be that the money grabbing fuckers in the BPI cant bear to have any artist make the charts or make money unless a large proportion of it goes to the industries first!

apauld (profile) says:

Re:

and doesn’t appear to have legs.

It’s more of a nose tweak concept, and getting everyone from social media sites to push it (Hi Mike!). It’s nothing more and nothing less than that.

I would like to see the data, that you apparently have found, that proves his music career will not be better in the long run for doing this. Please post your data and/or a link to where said data can be found.

G Thompson (profile) says:

Re:

It’s more of a nose tweak concept, and getting everyone from social media sites to push it (Hi Mike!). It’s nothing more and nothing less than that.

As a business model, it’s lacking.[emphasis added]

I bolded your comment to show just how absolutely stupid your actual comment is, well unless you have never heard of the concept of MARKETING ever before.

Getting sites to push something either by asking them too AT NO COST and then for Word of mouth to occur so other sites do it so it gets a certain viral push behind it is the wet dream of any marketer.

Though hey what does anyone know, you have decreed that it’s a horrible business model. You sure you never sold buggy whips in another life?

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