June 24, 2008

Horse 890 - Janking the ARIA charts for fun and profit.



I was speaking to Neve at Spit Music this afternoon and was asking some questions in my own inimitable style.
"You know that America song "A Horse With No Name", if it ran away, how would you get it back?"
"Call it"
"With what? It doesn't have a name"
"Oh yeah."

This was soon followed by:
"If I wanted to manipulate the ARIA charts, how many record sales would I need?"
"22"
"22?"
"Yeah, 22. This band called Sparkadia... well one of the band members' mums, walked in and bought 22 copies of the CD. It went to No.23 based on our CD sales"
"How?"
"Well there's only 27 record stores left in Australia that actually report to ARIA anymore. There just aren't that many record stores since everyone started downloading stuff."

That there says it all. If someone like Ellie Magill wanted to get her EP "Fists and Fingers" onto the ARIA charts, then you could either do it by microsales via iTunes or by actual CD sales through an ARIA reporting shop. Since it can't take more than 3 dozen sales to manipulate the charts, my suggestion is obvious and all we'd need would be the impetus to get us there.

Scary aint it?

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