REM: TEOTWAWKI Song Hits The Charts Again
I’ve done enough media in the last month to get a pretty good idea about how little effort is put into most news items. By my reckoning one minute of TV news would take 10-15 minutes of just 4-5 people: a cameraman, sound engineer (sometimes one person does both), the reporter, the editor and the producer. So I doubt they put much time into the music and found footage they use to go with the story. That would explain why well more than half of the doomsday news reports I have been associated with have shown clips from the 2012 movie and have used REM’s hit song as well.
R.E.M.’s doomsday anthem It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) has been given a big sales boost thanks to last week’s Mayan apocalypse prophecy.
…radio station programmers across the U.S. decided to have a little fun with the prediction and filled the airwaves with the disbanded group’s 1988 hit.
As a result, music fans picked up on the fun and snapped up the track on iTunes.com and other online digital services, swelling downloads from 3,000 the previous week to 19,000 during the December 17th-23rd sales week. The flood of interest gave R.E.M. another hit. The song re-entered the Rock Digital Songs chart at number 18 and Alternative Digital Songs at 14, according to Billboard.com
[Source: ABC4]
