Band Aid 30’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? topped the UK singles chart with 312,000 sales in its first week, but Bob Geldof is worried about how much money that will bring in to help the charity appeal.
Why? Because those 312,000 sales were downloads on the iTunes and Google Play stores, selling for 99p each rather than the £3.50 charged for the original Band Aid single in 1984.
“We need to sell 300% more than we did than [in 1984] to even begin to make up the cash figure. That worries me,” Geldof told BBC Radio 1, before encouraging fans to delete and “download again” if they’d bought the new single.
That won’t do much good, for modern music download stores let people re-download their previous purchases for free. But Geldof’s comments do raise a wider question: in 2014, is a song still an effective way to raise money for a charitable cause?
Actually, the answer is probably still yes, but not necessarily by selling it.
Watch the Band Aid 30 video on YouTube, and you might notice the “Download on iTunes NOW” link that remains on-screen throughout:
Meanwhile, an “i” icon at the top left of the screen pops up a little carousel directing viewers to iTunes and Google Play to buy, or to the official Band Aid donations website.
The description for the video has iTunes and Google Play first, then the link to the donations site, and a reminder that people can also text AID to the shortcode 70060 to donate £5.
It’s surprising that the latter isn’t more to the fore in the campaign, especially given the way the standard price for a single has dropped from £3.50 or greater to 99p in the digital age.
312,000 sales of the Band Aid 30 single would be equalled by just over 61,000 people sending a text message, and YouTube is an ideal platform to grab maximum online attention for this kind of campaign, then nudge them to donate.
A song – particularly one with a video full of stars – is still a great vehicle for this, and the inclusion in this year’s supergroup of YouTubers Zoella, Alfie Deyes and Joe Sugg shows that the Band Aid organisation aren’t strangers to the idea of “the attention economy”.
Standalone videos posted on YouTube by those three alone with a call to donate could be a powerful way to drive Band Aid 30 donations beyond past campaigns’ records, and that’s without suggesting similar videos (or even just tweets) from participating artists like One Direction, Ed Sheeran and Olly Murs.
Other possible solutions to the headache of 99p downloads: make an EP with outtakes and spoken-word tracks with artists talking about what the Band Aid 30 campaign means to them, and sell it for £3.50; bring streaming services like Spotify on board from the start rather than leaving them until the new year as they may be able to drive donations rather than cannibalise sales; sit down with Twitter and Facebook to figure out how to use their features to drive donations; gather the top Minecraft YouTubers and some music stars for a Twitch live-stream with a strong call for donations; act on the tough realisation that for many people, virtual currency in mobile games has more value than music nowadays, and work with some top app developers.
(Apple has just kicked off a campaign for AIDS charity Red using that last strategy. A fortnight’s percentage of in-app purchases of virtual items in games like Clash of Clans, Puzzle & Dragons and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood alone is going to yield a heap of most-definitely-not-virtual cash.)
This isn’t to suggest that Band Aid 30 isn’t accepting direct donations or telling people how to make them (it is, on both counts) or that it’s so stuck behind the times of the modern music industry that it’s not taking advantage of new platforms (it is, sort of).
It’s more that it’s not worth Bob Geldof wasting energy worrying about 99p downloads, when there are more positive ways of fundraising that Band Aid can and does use. The way people value recorded music may have changed since 1984, but their willingness to give more than a quid for an important cause when made aware of it is much less in doubt.
And for all the criticism, Do They Know It’s Christmas? remains a powerful awareness raiser, whether it’s Band Aid 30 that your £5 is going to, or another charity tackling the Ebola crisis.
