The Black Mountains have set their sights on a heady target of the chart number seven spot this Christmas armed only with a couple of quid, a smattering of musical ability and a belief in a free-think
United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland (Press Release) December 11, 2007 --
What have four lads from rural Herefordshire got in common with an acerbic TV pop pundit with a penchant for a high waistbanded trouser? The answer: nothing, hopefully... and therein lies the challenge.
As with any great idea this was one borne out of a discussion conducted over a melting pot of John Smiths and Staropramen... As a resultant segue from a “what-do-you-think-the-bloke-inside-Mr-Blobby-is-doing-now?” comment it was proffered that a Christmas number one, today, is attainable only by vast multinational corporations with a near bottomless budget for swaying young impressionable minds.
You can see where this is going...
So the challenge: how far up the charts could four mates with next-to-no knowledge of the music industry get with three months of planning and a few pennies amassed from their respective wallets (about £500)?
Past chart single sale stats show that an average of around 263,000 single sales will secure you the top spot on Christmas week... a Christmas number one is certainly a worthy ambition, but is a quarter of a million single sales genuinely possible?
The Black Mountains, assembled solely for this project and named after a mighty landscape of hills that neighbour their ancestral home of Herefordshire, all dabble with musical instruments and by calling in on a couple of connections up north managed to get the single, “Overplayed Song” recorded one Sunday afternoon without much of a dent to the modest budget.
So they recorded the single and saw that it was good, the next simple task: to sell 263,000 of them...
The ‘Mountains are planning a digital release across all the major channels from iTunes and Napster to HMV Digital with online and viral campaigns planned to make the most of every penny of their modest budget... however leveraging the coffers to top the charts has presented itself as rather an unsurprisingly onerous task and early projections suggest that only a close-but-no-cigar number seven position is achievable. “Number 1” is so prosaic anyway – why slip into the mould of countless other pop starlets by aiming at the top slot? At least The Black Mountains are original. Stupid, but original.
As the band lacks the golden ticket of unlimited finances or a hypnotic pair of nipple-line grazing trousers The Black Mountains hope to capture the public’s imagination this Christmas with a genuine alternative to the products of the manufactured pop conveyer belt. Fingers and toes in the band’s camp are well and truly crossed.
To hear the single and back the campaign to send The Black Mountains all the way to the hallowed number seven position this Christmas visit the campaign website at: www.thechristmasnumbersevenproject.com
The campaign website also features The Black Mountains’ celebrated “Chart-O-Meter”. Visitors to the website are asked to submit their email address as a mark of their intention to buy the single once it’s released online – the Chart-O-Meter then cunningly converts the pledged number of sales into an equivalent chart position for Christmas week. The target: position number 7, of course.
As with any great idea this was one borne out of a discussion conducted over a melting pot of John Smiths and Staropramen... As a resultant segue from a “what-do-you-think-the-bloke-inside-Mr-Blobby-is-doing-now?” comment it was proffered that a Christmas number one, today, is attainable only by vast multinational corporations with a near bottomless budget for swaying young impressionable minds.
You can see where this is going...
So the challenge: how far up the charts could four mates with next-to-no knowledge of the music industry get with three months of planning and a few pennies amassed from their respective wallets (about £500)?
Past chart single sale stats show that an average of around 263,000 single sales will secure you the top spot on Christmas week... a Christmas number one is certainly a worthy ambition, but is a quarter of a million single sales genuinely possible?
The Black Mountains, assembled solely for this project and named after a mighty landscape of hills that neighbour their ancestral home of Herefordshire, all dabble with musical instruments and by calling in on a couple of connections up north managed to get the single, “Overplayed Song” recorded one Sunday afternoon without much of a dent to the modest budget.
So they recorded the single and saw that it was good, the next simple task: to sell 263,000 of them...
The ‘Mountains are planning a digital release across all the major channels from iTunes and Napster to HMV Digital with online and viral campaigns planned to make the most of every penny of their modest budget... however leveraging the coffers to top the charts has presented itself as rather an unsurprisingly onerous task and early projections suggest that only a close-but-no-cigar number seven position is achievable. “Number 1” is so prosaic anyway – why slip into the mould of countless other pop starlets by aiming at the top slot? At least The Black Mountains are original. Stupid, but original.
As the band lacks the golden ticket of unlimited finances or a hypnotic pair of nipple-line grazing trousers The Black Mountains hope to capture the public’s imagination this Christmas with a genuine alternative to the products of the manufactured pop conveyer belt. Fingers and toes in the band’s camp are well and truly crossed.
To hear the single and back the campaign to send The Black Mountains all the way to the hallowed number seven position this Christmas visit the campaign website at: www.thechristmasnumbersevenproject.com
The campaign website also features The Black Mountains’ celebrated “Chart-O-Meter”. Visitors to the website are asked to submit their email address as a mark of their intention to buy the single once it’s released online – the Chart-O-Meter then cunningly converts the pledged number of sales into an equivalent chart position for Christmas week. The target: position number 7, of course.
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