Band Aid 30 will challenge the digital generation's 'free economy' mindset
- Summary:
- Thirty years after we bought the original charity single, will Band Aid 30 in aid of fighting Ebola inspire a digital generation to spend in the 'free economy'?
Today sees the release of Band Aid 30, the 2014 update of the 1984 charity phenomenon that sparked the global LiveAid concert in aid of combatting the famine in Ethiopia.
This year’s version will see the funds raised going to fight the Ebola virus in Africa and features a line-up of contemporary artists as well as a few of the originals.U2 frontman Bono sings a reworked lyric 'Well, tonight, we're reaching out and touching you', while Seal, Ellie Goulding, One Direction, Sinead O'Connor, Olly Murs, Jessie Ware and Queen's Roger Taylor among others all feature.
So far, so admirable. One question did occur to me when I heard about this and that was how easy it was going to be to get people to buy the track. If you’ve got One Direction on board, then that’s a global audience of teens sorted who are going to want to hear it and see the video, so the reach is clearly there.
But it’s a very different world from the one in which I and millions of others trotted down to HMV to buy the single back in the 1980s. This was pre-internet, pre-iTunes, pre-YouTube, pre-Spotify and most importantly pre-file sharing and pre-online piracy.
This is a double-edged sword. Back then, we’d all seen the TV news reports on the BBC from Ethiopia and we’d talk to our friends and neighbours about that and what we read in the print newspaper.
Today, the ability to mobilize action and to exploit social media to create peer communities and promote global activism is so much greater.
But how do you get people to remember in a ‘free economy’ that some things are worth paying for? I still remember Sir Bob Geldof swearing at his global audience during the LiveAid concert for being too caught up in the entertainment and forgetting to pick up the phone to pledge donations.
Sir Bob yesterday identified this as a genuine concern for the BandAid30 organizers:
The record, it’s a song, it’s a track, but it’s an event, and the next stage now is to turn this into a phenomenon like it was in the ’80s, and the only way to do that is to get people to buy the thing.
Spare me this free economy. Spare me Spotify and YouTube. There is a donate button on YouTube. Hit the donate button.
It really doesn’t matter if you don’t like this song. It really doesn’t matter if you don’t like the artists, it really doesn’t matter if it turns out to be a lousy recording – what you have to do is buy this thing.
To improve the chances of that, a decidedly anti-digital decision has been taken by not making the song available to stream on Spotify until January with the official outlets being iTunes for the sum of 99 pence or $1.29. (Why no GooglePlay or Amazon MP3 I wonder?)
The video is up on YouTube and you can download free apps from iTunes and GooglePlay to run on your phones and tablets, although you’re supposed to be over 17 to do so - which is kinda at the top end of that One Direction audience.An in-app purchase is required to access exclusive content from the Band Aid 30 feed once the apps are downloaded.
So all told, there are plenty of official ways to get access to Harry, Zayn and Co. (I realize that the diginomica audience is unlikely to be the target demographic here!) with the hope that exposure will result in the purchasing of the audio download.
The video accompanying the track is appropriately harrowing of course and it’s to be hoped that the digital generation will be as moved to donate as their analog predecessors back in the ‘80s.
I choose to believe they will.
Certainly early Twitter response after the video aired on Sunday evening in the UK during Simon Cowell’s X-Factor prompted some encouraging responses.
My take
Get over to iTunes and download it now!