Chart Review 30th May 2005 with DJ Chris Plant (1/4)	(1/4), (2/4), (3/4), (4/4).
www.djchrisplant.co.uk

My American friend emailed me on Sunday afternoon with an air of deep concern. Is it true that a ringtone has topped the singles chart over there? Well of course if you are a newspaper hack the answer is Yes, a ten second ringtone is indeed the Number One single in the UK and it is the end of the music business as we know it. The rest of us know the real story of course. When German telecoms company Jamster picked up the rights to a well known viral flash animation and its accompanying sound effect for sale as a mobile ringtone, they wound up with something of a phenomenon on their hands.

Backed of course by copious amounts of carefully targeted television advertising, Crazy Frog became the must have download for an entire generation across Europe (most of all TOWNIES). With that kind of ubiquity it was almost inevitable that someone would turn the jingle into a crappy pop record - it was after all a chance for Jamster to make even more money out of the concept.

Producers Bass Bumpers (hitherto known only for their 1994 Top 30 single The Music's Got Me) have meshed the ding-ding-ding of Crazy Frog onto a by the numbers cover version of Harold Faltermeyer's 1995 movie hit Axel F and the result is what you see here, a record that has sold 150,000 copies in its first week onsale (curiously enough only a handful of them online), enough to make it far and away the biggest selling track of the week. (F*****G Disgrace)!!! What is happening to our music in the UK.

The good bands and singers are not getting the recognition that they deserve. It is about time we banned all of this Pop shit and got a proper singles chart again. I know there's a market for it but the real musicians/music lovers don't wanna hear it!!! Of course creatively speaking it is an incredibly lazy piece of music making (could they not have thought up an original tune for heavens sake) but the actual single itself is really only part of the story. Axel F has exploded into the chart thanks to the most intensive TV marketing campaign in history.

To promote their track, Jamster spent several million pounds in buying airtime not just on Satellite channels but on the likes of ITV and Channel 4, ensuring that plugs for the track (and of course the ringtone) were in almost every commercial break on television.

So intensive was the campaign that the Advertising Standards Authority were forced to issue a statement saying they had no powers to act over the frequency of the commercials, despite thousands of complaints. Faced with that kind of onslaught it is hardly surprising that the single outsold everything else in its wake, albeit at the cost of a huge chunk of people being put off the singles chart for life.

Continued ... next page

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