Ethereal Rockers Barcelona Say Thanks For Sales Bump From Pirated YouTube Video
A song by the band Barcelona was used without permission in a short production by Vancouver documentarian Jon Rawlinson that went viral on YouTube with 911,000 plays and climbing.
But instead of the calling their lawyers to sue for unauthorized use of their wonderfully textured original song "Please Don't Go", the band watched their iTunes sales climb and even did a short video (below) explaining their reaction and thanking the filmmaker. So far the band's label Universal Motown has not objected either. The original pirated video is after the jump.
The original video for "Please Don't Go":
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So far I haven’t seen any specifics as to what kind of “boost” their sales got from the video, or how they directly correlated them to the video views. Has anyone been able to track down actual numbers for this?
Also, did they use this viral success to gather information about the new fans (i.e. mailing list, etc.), or do they just have extra anonymous iTunes sales? As far as longevity, bands need to be able to leverage viral success (should they be lucky enough to happen upon it) into something more sustainable.
Currently they are #33 on the iTunes rock chart. Pretty sure they weren’t anywhere close to that prior to the video. They have been a band for a number of years with a healthy fanbase, and are signed to Universal. So if anything it appears that this video has created a much wider awareness.
week before the video went up they sold 5 tracks of “Please Don’t Go”, the next week with 200,000 or so views, the sales of PDG went up to 231, now this last week, with the Youtube views at almost a million and the viemo views at over a half-million, they sold 1457 tracks of “PDG”
Digital album sales increased dramatically too, something like from 50 to 250 to 850 this week.
Thanks for digging that up. Interesting.