So..in the run up to Christmas 2009 a grass roots campaign was started to show the cynical Simon Cowell and his cronies that the Christmas Number 1 single was not in fact part of the prize for winning the X factor.
The campaign, which was started by a couple in facebook, frustrated by the UK Christmas Number 1 spot being hi-jacked by the X facter for the previous 5 years, was soon spread into other networks like Twitter and very soon snowballed into a media frenzy. Millions of users joined and pledged their support for it, and also that they would buy the chosen RATM single at the appropriate time. Needless to say, Simon Cowell was not impressed and initially said it was a pathetic attempt to attack the X Factor – completely missing the point of the campaign.
The upshot of the saga is that RATM did indeed get the UK Christmas Number 1, Simon Cowell graciously admitted defeat and he the band said they were very impressed with how the whole campaign was run. The band has donated all the proceeds of the single sales to charity, and as a reward to the fans, they promised to give a free concert this summer for all those that made it possible.
All good so far…but now it has had the shine taken off the whole experience. the reason? the ticketing company instructed to distibute the tickets for the organised concert in the summer. In a convoluted and and arbitrary manner they have failed in the task to fairly distribute the tickets – clearly a free concert is going to attract an awful lot of interest, but the way it has been handled is at best hap-hazzard and at worst, in a very cynical and careless manner.
So what did they do? well to start they had issued a two day window in which you could register your interest in having a ticket, the registration involved submitting all your details and uploading a ‘passport’ style photo of yourself (presumeably in an attempt to defeat the touts) all fine so far, except the acceptance of the photo is somewhat random, my first submission was rejected and so I had to re-submit all info and a new photo – out of curiosity I submitted a lesser quality image – which was accepted, I have heard that actual passport photo’s were also rejected – thus establishing that the acceptance was conducted in an pretty arbitrary and random manner.
OK, so registration complete, what next? what follows is the complete failure to realise the scale of the appeal. It was announced to the successful applicants that they would need to effectively re-apply to get themselves entered into a ballot for the tickets and that they should do this from a set time on a set day. The consequences of this are clear – every single person tried to enter the site to do this at the specified time, and the site completely failed to cope and crashed. This was not only unnecessary, but also demonstrated a clear lack of foresight. The end result of this is that the tickets simply went to the ones who were lucky enough to get through to the website before it failed, they were not chosen out of a ballot of all registrants as was originally intended.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it is common sense that the second ticket ‘application’ was completely unnecessary and would inevitably result in an unfair outcome. They already had the details of everyone interested, so they could have simply balloted that to find the required number of tickets for the concert.
Tags: Christmas Number 1, Facebook, Rage Against the Machine, RATM, Simon Cowell, Twitter, UK, X Factor
