Posts Tagged ‘music’

As you will have seen from Flick’s blog post a couple of weeks ago, To InFINNity and beyond, a few of the elite ‘athletes’ at Ruder Finn will be taking part in the NSPCC Step Change 2011on 6th March, a race to the top of one of London’s most iconic buildings, the Gherkin.

‘Tower running’ turns the idea of a race literally on its head. Instead of running on a typical route, we will be climbing the 1037 stairs up the Gherkin in a race to the 38th floor. Pretty difficult I’m sure you will agree.  So we need some motivation, something to get the blood pumping, the adrenaline running and basically to keep us moving.

For this, we need your help.  The Step Change team has set up a collaborative playlist on Spotify and you can suggest the songs that we run to. It’s really simple and won’t take a minute:

- Click on the link here to access the Ruder Finn StepChange Spotify playlist

- Once you’ve opened the playlist in Spotify, just search for the song you want us to run to, add drag and drop into the playlist

- Only rules are that the songs are upbeat, and preferably related to steps, climbing, mountains, heights… *gulp* - oh and no swearing please, we’re a nice bunch

Alternatively, if you don’t have access to Spotify you can leave your suggestions in the comments box below and we will add the song to the playlist on your behalf.

Thanks to everybody for their support so far – we’ve just smashed the £500 barrier and are well on our way to reaching our target.  But we’re not there yet, so please give generously via our fund-raising page.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks you will all be aware that the (wrong, in my opinion) winner of X Factor was crowned on Sunday. Geordie lad Joe McElderry beat Olly Murs with over 60% of the vote, securing a record contract and almost certainly a place on Dancing on Ice in a couple of years.

But, in a strange twist of events, it seems that poor old Joe may be deprived of the 15 minutes of fame pretty much guaranteed to all X Factor winners - the coveted Christmas Number 1 slot. A campaign which was started on Facebook encouraging people to buy Rage Against the Machine’s track ‘killing in the name of’ has seen the song start to outsell the X Factor winner by an estimated 10% , making it the favourite to be number one this weekend.

Simon Cowell has spoken out against the campaign, calling it ’stupid’ and it’s participants ’scrooges’. Poor Simon, as if becoming TV’s first billionaire wasn’t bad enough, he now has to face the prospect of one of his many, many acts not doing as well as he had hoped. I, for one, think it’s an excellent campaign, not just because I think Olly should have won, but because it is an excellent example of the power of social media and how it can mobilise society. Ok, so it might not be over something as important as global warming, but if people can hold a strong enough opinion about this and feel compelled to do something about it, then maybe this model can work for important campaigns in the future. As organiser Jon Morter said, ‘Even if we didn’t quite succeed it will still be a great achievement in bringing people together and actually trying to do something’. (NME.com)

What do you think? Can something as simple as a Facebook group re-write music history, and possibly change the way we campaign in future?