Thursday 10 September 2009

Let's get The Who to number 1!

A campaign has begun to get The Who to number 1 in the UK singles chart, a feat they have never achieved in a career spanning five decades.

The premise is simple - in the week commencing 16th November 2009 as many people as possible (that means you, me and all our friends) need to buy an MP3 download of The Who's classic track "Baba O'Riley" (found on the thoroughly excellent, if not spectacularly titled, album "Who's Next"). If the campaign gets up enough steam, and enough support from people willing to shell out 79p - 99p to add this classic song to their MP3 libraries, then we get The Who back in the charts and hopefully to number one.

There are lots of good reasons to do this. Firstly, The Who have never had a number 1, so this is a great opportunity to right that wrong (and necessitate an update to a music round pub quiz question). Secondly, "Baba O'Riley" is a truly great song and deserves to be brought to the attention of a wider, younger audience - a kind of rock public service, if you will. Next, this kind of grass-roots web campaign could, potentially, highlight people-power in modern music sales, and illustrate how few sales are needed to trouble the charts these days. Also, this can be seen as an experiment in the power of social networking - can we do this? And lastly, wouldn't it be nice to have a proper song topping the charts for a change, even if only for one week? Maybe it's just me and maybe I'm getting old, but don't the charts seem to be, well, just a bit rubbish lately? Here's a chance to do something about that, even if only temporarily.

So, join the campaign and tell all your friends about it too. So far, the campaign has a website, Facebook group, MySpace page and a Twitter feed where you can find out more... join up now and prepare, in ten weeks time, to flex your chart muscle!