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Selling Out is Good: Saul Williams Racks up $$$ from Nike Commercial

You may hate on Saul Williams for licensing his song to Nike for their latest ad campaign. Call him a sellout, but the dude is selling out all the way to the bank.

Indeed, the original video for “List of Demands” has become a posthumous hit; it has racked up more than 400,000 views on youtube.com, 40 times more than the ad itself. The digital single of the song has been selling 10,000 copies a week since the ad first aired.

Williams gave fans the option of downloading the album for free or paying $5 for it, not unlike Radiohead’s “It’s up to you” pricing strategy for its self-released digital version of “In Rainbows” the same month.

After two months, 154,449 fans had downloaded Williams’ album, though less than 19 percent paid for it.

Yet two months later [after the Nike commercial] the number of downloads had increased to 225,000 with 60,000 paid, twice the number who bought the rapper’s previous album.

Although Saul’s move sparked some major discussions in the blog community, the uproar that his Nike decision caused is now rendered moot. The handful of fans who backlashed against his decision were replaced by more than 60,000 paying fans who would. Saul’s newfound popularity is generating consumer interest all across the board, and he was able to double his album sales overnight. These sales will surely extend to his previous albums as well as his books of poetry. Of course it doesn’t make Saul’s decision to go with Nike any less cringe worthy (we all know that Nike has had a history of running sweatshops and List of Demands is about reparations), but like I said before, this move was for the greater good and it finally seems that everybody is happy. (via Ad Age)

Tags: List of Demands, Nike, Saul Williams

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Couch Sessions Appoved Artist, Hip-Hop, Negroclash!

Saul Williams On “Selling Out”….In DC on Monday

No doubt most of you have seen this new Nike commercial featuring Saul Williams. It’s been plastered across ESPN, and the NCAA March Madness tournament for the past couple weeks.Most people were a little concerned that Saul would let a song about reparations be used by a corporate giant like Nike, who still uses sweat shop labor in Asia. Saul went at the haters on his message board:

I have never seen a Nike ad and thought “I gotta get those shoes”, but I have thought, “who sings that? I gotta get that album”. which is to say, am I selling Nikes or is Nike selling Saul Williams albums?

I made $0 from the sales of that album….so far.

I might consider myself a sellout if I wrote a song FOR a corporation, but an ad exec asking me to use my song in their commercial, strikes me as not much different as a student asking to use my song in their film. Granted I can think of plenty of corporations that I would say no to and a couple of years ago I probably would have said no to Nike, just as I did to Mercedes (but they actually wanted me to write a poem about a car! A poem!). But, yes, I knew that Nike had made certain steps in addressing issues, which I had to research years ago as my neice, who is a formidable athlete, and daughter have both begged me for Nikes. Although I do not personally own a pair, I remember what it was like to be in junior high school. They’re both really excited about the commercial.

The commercial is damn cool, and I see this as a sacrifice for the greater good. If only a fraction of the millions of people who saw this ad would go and research the artist and maybe even go to his shows, then everybody wins. Saul gets more fans (and more money), and Nike gets to further cement its status as being a trend setter in the marketplace.

Hopefully, the dude got more from NIKE than the paltry $80,000 that Feist and Yael Naim got from Apple for their commercial endorsement.

Saul is playing the 9:30 Club on Monday, and it’s not sold out. Check out our interview with Saul Williams from 2006.

Tags: Couch Sessions Approved Artist, Nike, Saul Williams

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