President Trump appears to have helped seriously boost streams and sales of the Nickelback song “Photograph” by including the tune in a controversial social media post last week.
Mr. Trump shared a video on Twitter last Wednesday, Oct. 2, that featured the audio and an edited excerpt of the music video for Nickelback’s “Photograph,” a single released by the Canadian rock group in 2005.
Although the clip tweeted by Mr. Trump disappeared quickly from Twitter due to a copyright complaint brought on behalf of the band, the number of digital streams and paid downloads of the song swelled in the hours afterward, Billboard first reported this week.
Citing data for Oct. 2 and 3 collected by Nielsen Music, an industry analytics firm, the report said that the song was streamed about 772,000 times by users of on-demand services like YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify, translating to a 38% increase compared to the previous two days.
And while the total number of paid downloads of the song last week totaled only 1,000, sales for Oct. 2 and 3 shot up 569% over the same span, the report said.
The clip by Mr. Trump was a dig at former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, the current frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and was removed from the platform within hours of being tweeted last week.
The original music video for the song begins by showing Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger displaying a framed photograph while singing the opening line, “Look at this photograph.” In the version tweeted by Mr. Trump, the photo was replaced with a photo of Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter, at a golf course alongside a Ukrainian gas executive.
“LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH!” Mr. Trump captioned the video. His tweet remains visible on Twitter, but the video has been replaced with a message that says it was “disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”
Mr. Trump has alleged that the Democratic candidate pressured Ukraine while vice president to fire a prosecutor who had been investigating a gas firm that employed his son. Mr. Trump asked during a July phone call for the current president of Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, triggering the whistleblower complaint that resulted in Democrats initiating a formal impeachment inquiry last month.
Nickelback has not commented publicly on the president’s tweet.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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