A great example of how consumer-generated content skyrocketed the sale of hip-shaking Latin singer Shakira’s music and broke a digital music downloading record is recounted today in the New York Times.
Apparently, sales of Shakira’s “Oral Fixation Vol. 2” album had begun to fall and her record company planned to re-release the album with the new song “Hips Don’t Lie” on it. First, though, the company engaged Verizon and Yahoo! Music to help in the promotion of the song.
As part of that promotion, listeners were asked to submit videos of themselves shaking their own hips to Shakira’s song. Within one day of being released, the compilation of those fan videos (embedded at the bottom of this post) reached No. 1 on Yahoo’s video downloading service. Within weeks, it had been downloaded over a million times.>
[‘Hips Don’t Lie’] set a record for selling the most copies of a digital song in one week after it was released May 27. The song was downloaded about 266,500 times in its first week on sale, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That broke the previous record of 175,000 copies of D4L’s “Laffy Taffy.”
