Twitter Inspires K’NAAN Song
This could be an April Fools joke.. but on the other hand, it could be a successful campaign. I’ve been on Twitter for some time and have seen the emergence of hashtags (or inserting the hash (#) in front of a subject keyword) as a powerful way to find stuff on a specific topic.
Now, K’NAAN has taken the idea of the hashtag to a whole new level with the idea of his new song (as publicised by the lovely Emmylou Benson at Universal Music):
K’NAAN TO RELEASE ‘TWITTER SINGLE’
ASSEMBLED FROM FANS’ TWEETS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(TORONTO, April 1, 2009) – Somali-Canadian musical trailblazer K’NAAN is about to collaborate with his fans in an unprecedented way –assembling a new version of his song “People Like Me” from their tweets on Twitter. On April 1, K’NAAN will invite his Twitter followers to download the special instrumental version of the song, created specially for this promotion, and submit their own lyrics for the story via his Twitter. All fan tweets tagged with #knaansong will be considered for inclusion in the final song. Deadline for submissions is May 1. Following that, K’NAAN will assemble the best tweets and record the results. The final track will be made available to fans via free download on K’NAAN’s Twitter page at http://twitter.com/thedustyfoot and his official site at http://knaanmusic.com. This will mark the first time Twitter will be officially used for the creation of a song.
K’NAAN’s latest album, Troubadour, was released on Feb 24 and debuted at #1 and #3 on the digital album charts in Canada and the United States, respectively: sure evidence of the electronically-oriented nature of many of his fans. This Twitter song collaboration is a logical extension of the new relationships being forged by artists and their audiences in an increasingly interconnected world.
More information can be found at http://www.amoctone.com/knaan/plmtweet/
For those not familiar with hashtags, Sudha Krishna recently pushed out some details via Twitter, HERE. You can read the Ultimate Guide to Twitter Hashtags, HERE.
