Duo’s Song Goes Viral, With Help From Sir Paul
There was no stopping “Black Beatles” once Paul McCartney got involved.
Though the song by the rap duo Rae Sremmurd had been rising, it hit Number 1 on the Billboard singles chart recently in a most unexpected fashion after becoming the de facto soundtrack to the Mannequin Challenge, the online video craze of the moment, where subjects hold a pose as the camera pans across a comically eerie tableau.
“Love those Black Beatles #MannequinChallenge,” the 74-year- old Mr. McCartney posted to Twitter on November 10, along with a video of him — still — at a piano as the song’s spare intro blooms into a joyous number about “rocking John Lennon lenses.”
But most crucial to its rise were the California high school students who, by chance, made “Black Beatles” the score of choice for the rampant trend. “Black Beatles” joins a peculiar lineage of recent hits that have been boosted by organic user-generated content on social media, outside of the traditional channels of music promotion.
“The components of what makes a hit have changed so dramatically,” said David Bakula, a senior analyst for Nielsen Music, which supplies the data for Billboard. “This is not a world that is dominated by just radio and sales. There are new creative outlets to market songs, albums and artists.”
Luckily for major labels such as Interscope, which released Rae Sremmurd’s album, “SremmLife 2,” to modest sales in August, fans can now spread music on an almost unimaginable scale.
On November 2, students at Colony High School in Ontario, California, choreographed an elaborate #MannequinChallenge video just as the fad was taking off. A student there, Joseph Day, 17, became the first to use “Black Beatles” with the video because, as he explained on Twitter, “It’s my favorite song and I wanted my friends and the internet to all hear it and enjoy it as well.”
The next night, at a concert in Denver, Rae Sremmurd led the crowd in its own rendition of the meme, eventually earning nearly 60,000 retweets of the video and linking “Black Beatles” to the challenge.
“It was like a lightning strike,” said John Janick, head of Interscope. “Without the Mannequin Challenge, this song would’ve been a hit — who knows how far it would go. But with the Mannequin Challenge, it’s gigantic.”
Streams of “Black Beatles” had risen from 15 million in the final week of October to nearly 43 million in mid-November.
Psy’s “Gangnam Style” was an early beneficiary of a song going viral. But“Black Beatles” may have wider reach. The #MannequinChallenge videos have succeeded in driving people back to Rae Sremmurd’s music.
“It’s not just this one song, it’s not just this one video,” Mr. Bakula said. “That’s the kind of thing that can buoy a career.”