RotD Music Editor Lee Thompson examines the rush release of Mark Ronson's Uptown Funk in the wake of its X Factor pre-release performance by contestant Fleur East

10 December 2014 - Editorial

For weeks now, we’ve been keeping tabs on Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars. We had it marked down as a Record Of The Day contender for ages and mentioned it in our Mongrel section as soon as we heard it. Set for release on January 11, it was inevitably shaping up to be as big as Pharrell’s Happy, crossing over with the widest possible punter appeal. But Columbia here in the UK was going to be sitting on it for another five weeks.

 Then, on Saturday night, those release plans suddenly looked somewhat foolish. We’re very fond of Walthamstow lass Fleur East on ITV’s The X Factor. So when her pre-performance VT package revealed she was going to sing a song that almost nobody knew yet and that Simon Cowell had only heard for the first time five days earlier, we feared the worst. There was no need to, though. With all the confidence and swagger of a superstar like Janet Jackson at the peak of her fame, Fleur romped through a stellar performance of Uptown Funk that suddenly put her head and shoulders ahead of the pack to win this year’s contest. Within 24 hours, her version of the track on iTunes was topping their download chart. We’d love to have been a fly on the wall in Columbia’s product meeting on Monday morning. After all, the Fleur version through Syco was chart ineligible even though it was showing up on iTunes and demand for every version of the song (dodgy or official) was now going through the roof. A very bold move was required and boy, they delivered one.

Six days earlier, a source at the label stated to us that the Ronson plan was about to change quite dramatically and that Spotify had now added it for worldwide streaming, crucially including the UK. Now this may not seem like a huge move, but the sway Radio 1 and, more significantly, Global’s Capital group hold over the industry here is noteworthy. Capital’s stance on pre-release tracks and Spotify’s position are polls apart. The radio station wants to be able to be seen to have songs building and championed over a long period, sometimes even over six weeks or longer. They’re protecting their multi-million pound operation, after all, and trying to find the right acts for their key summer and pre-Christmas live events at Wembley and London’s O2 Arena. Their current opinion is that On Air On Sale, which works well across the rest of the world, didn’t work when it was tried here a few years ago and still will see a lot of tracks fail to live up to expectations, rather than having that huge pre-order build up and a big chart entry on download release. As much as we sympathise and can see that point of view, Spotify and the change of chart rules (which now allow streaming stats to count towards a UK chart position) have together shaken things up in the last six months. Now labels, particularly Sony’s family, are seeing that Capital may be holding them back and that they could instead be building the song neatly through streaming numbers were it not for the fear of having the station refuse to playlist your track. When Apple launches its streaming service, possibly in the spring, watch that shake things up yet again though. Surely Capital can’t play hardball forever, can they? 

When Radio 1 and Capital published their weekly playlists last Wednesday evening, Uptown Funk had been added to Radio 1 (they seem less concerned about Spotify streaming and look like they’re about to embrace it even more – which is probably a good thing all round), whereas it was noticeably absent from Capital’s list, even though the new Meghan Trainor single (also a Sony track, but RCA as opposed to Columbia) was added and the release date for that was January 25, a full two weeks after the Ronson single was originally due to drop. Was this a sign that they were potentially rubbing some noses at Sony in the dirt, perhaps? To date, at the time of writing, according to music monitoring service comparemyradio.com, Radio 1 has played the track no more than 10 times during this past week with even less exposure from Capital – however, it was played on their London breakfast show on Tuesday morning, we noted.

It’s becoming obvious that the UK is being held back because of much of this. Many huge markets see tracks sitting in the Top 10 iTunes chart sometimes months before they’re available to buy in this country and that’s why we see dodgy covers permeate the bottom end of the Top 200. In the case of Ronson, he’s a UK-signed artist with a UK-signed track, something that made the availability in the rest of the world seem even more ludicrous, of course.

We now understand that the UK release date may have been more fluid than we first realised and that Columbia decided to just go for it after Saturday night’s X Factor sealed the deal and raised the profile of the song instantly.

It all throws up so many interesting thoughts and questions but one thing is for sure – it’s reassuring to know that you can still break an unknown pre-release song in front of a captive audience of 8 million people on primetime television if it’s presented to them in an exciting, relevant and contemporary way. We’d even argue she came across as being slicker and better rehearsed than US girlband Fifth Harmony, who performed on the show the night after, having previously won X Factor USA with Cowell at the helm mentoring them. We think it also shows how great a mainstream pop show like Top Of The Pops could now be if it were to return on a regular basis in some new form or another in 2015. We live in hope, as ever.

It’s all certainly made the Christmas chart race a pretty exciting one for the first time in years and you’d be daft to bet against Uptown Funk being the next UK million-selling single within weeks. Huge respect to Columbia for having the balls to actually give the public what they what, when they want it for once, to hell with the political implications and fallout from other parts of the industry who continue to fight against all that. Thanks to their eagerness to strike while the iron was hot, they’ve now made 2015 a thrill of a ride for us all to watch very closely. Expect the infighting at majors over the delicate and diplomatic balancing of radio promotion alongside streaming and download sales on any given project to now come to a noticeable head.