With the music industry’s major labels lagging behind in the transition to digital downloads, bands are finding the boost to success in an unlikely place.

When Nick Haley made an amateur video for an iPod touch, he had no clue that he would rocket the band he had chosen to the digital top charts.

Haley’s music choice, "Music is My Hot, Hot Sex" by CSS (Cansei de Ser Sexy) had only been selling about 340 albums per week through the month of October.  When the iPod commercial aired on October 28th it only took two weeks for album sales to climb to 2,000 records, the #15 slot in downloads, and the # 5 slot in ring tone sales at iTunes.

"This is one of the rare instances where we can point to a single event and say, ‘This is for sure what’s driving all of our record sales,’ " said Tony Kiewel, CSS’s agent at Sub Pop records.”The band is completely absent from this country and has been for ages. And the record is over a year old."

CSS has not been the only one to reap from the publicity that is an iPod advertisement.  Feists single "1234", Steriogram’s "Walkie Talkie Man", and Rinôçérôse’s "Cubicle" are just a few of the bands who have seen boosts in sales and heightened chart ratings.

Despite the obvious success of this new age way of publicizing a group’s music, some music officials see this as a way to shorten your 15 minutes of fame.  Thankfully, the bands are mostly ignoring them as both the bands and the listeners are happy with this new lease to music’s life.

 

Related:

iTunes ’slow sales’ report possibly wrong

iPod makes a name for Apple while reaching sales milestone

The new U2 iPod

Amazon offers two iPods for the price of one

Steal an iPod Touch, buy music using someone else’s iTunes account

Entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 5:51 pm under Apple, Music.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Emilie Branstetter.
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