Did Radiohead’s iTunes stems boost Nude’s chart position?
Congratulations to Radiohead, whose `Nude’ single is sitting pretty at No. 37 in the US Billboard Hot 100 chart. Not bad, considering their last appearance was in 1996. However, Listening Post points out that selling the single as five separate `stems’ on iTunes as part of a remixing competition might have helped a tad, since many fans will have effectively bought the single five times. Besides the doubt over whether Radiohead would go to all that effort just to get into a singles chart, it’s still unclear whether all those stem sales counted towards the chart anyway. If they did, watch out for other bands following suit – we hear The Polyphonic Spree may do it with individual vocal stems for each band member…
March 26th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
[...] Increasingly, artists are making their songs available for fans to remix. Radiohead’s release of individual instrument ‘stems’ for Nude through iTunes is one of the most famous examples, but Franz Ferdinand did it for Ulysses [...]