Ryan MacMillan

Here at RMM (replete with shiny new website: come for the layout, stay for the quality etc.) we love ourselves some Last.fm. We also - and I feel I can speak on behalf of the entire team here - hate X Factor with the heat of a thousand red-hot suns. So you’d think that we’d be right behind Last.fm’s campaign to ensure that whomsoever Simon Cowell ensures is his next slavishly indifferent over-promoted backup singer does not become this year’s Christmas no.1.

You’d think.

Now, maybe Iain and Leo and Matt and Ben (one day, I swear we’ll have more than just one guy with more than one syllable in his name) have all gleefully downloaded Lucky Soul’s “Lips Are Unhappy”, the tune Last.fm are promoting at cut price to achieve their noble ends, but me, I’m just not, well, buying it.

First of all, the song itself is about as Christmassy as Ebeneezer Scrooge (pre-ghosts). As Peter Robinosn rightly points out, “the last great Christmas single was Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’” (her only great single, to be honest) and ‘Lips are Unhappy’ does not precisely add to the pantheon of timeless Christmas songs (ie: the ones that drive you a little bit mad the seventeenth time you hear them in Woolworths).

Secondly the whole exercise just feels a little forced to me. It’s clearly supposed to be a sort of grassroots (rather, netroots) guerilla campaign against the mainstream media’s death drvie towards ubiquitous mediocrity. But it strikes me that maybe Last.fm isn’t exactly the little guy, anymore. Indeed, I’m reminded a little bit of Ask.com’s nonsensical “Stop the Online Information Monopoly” campaign againstGoogle. This isn’t a groundswell of public support for a great single by an unsigned band (a la Nizlopi), it’s a marketing promotion by pretty much the biggest name in social music media.

Which leads me to point three: if people are only buying “Lips are Unhappy” (or using Ask.com) because they hate X-Factor (or Google), then we have not really addressed the initial problem, which is that the people who buy X-Factor singles (or use Google) do so because they do like those products, those brands. Maybe the aim shouldn’t be to hype up a campaign based purely on ‘not being that one guy’ (aka: John Kerry’s “Not Bush” presidential platform ion 2004) but to have a really good product which people want to buy, irregardless of the cultural evils wrought by its competitors.

(nb: my loathing of X-Factor should not, in anyway, be taken to indicate that I do not love Will Young.)