Livin On A Prayer Re-Enters The Billboard Hot 100 Because of This Dude...
Still on the fence about Billboard's decision to include YouTube data in their Hot 100 chart tabulation? Well, get off it because Bon Jovi "Livin On A Prayer" has re-entered the charts thanks to some dancing dude in Boston.
Meet Jeremy Fry. Back in 2008 he did a passionate lip-sync dance to thie 1987 Bon Jovi hit "Livin On A Prayer" when it was played at a Celtics game. Here's a 2008 YouTube upload of it which caught the attention of Huffington Post Comedy.
The reason why a five year old "viral" is making a 26 year old song chart is apparently because a version of it was uploaded and promoted by viral aggregator utrend.tv, netting 11 million fresh views. And Billboard — who to their credit, is amazingly transparent about this stuff — says that those views account for 94% of the "chart points," and the other 6% from the 4,000 downloads sold that week (an 11% rise from the previous) and approximately 500 radio plays.
How you choose to view all this depends on how cynical you are, but it's clear that the Hot 100 is going to someday essentially be an online chart. Which might be what it should be...
In the meantime, I can promise you that somebody somewhere is probably realizing that the Payola window has moved from radio stations to the Internet...
