Nickelback‘s unexpected brush with Donald Trump has seen the band experiencing a huge rise in their streaming fortunes.
The Canadian band made headlines last week after the US President included their 2005 hit ‘Photograph’ in a viral meme he tweeted to attack Democrat rival Joe Biden.
The meme allows users to replace the titular photograph in the song’s music video with a different image. When it came to Trump, he tried to link Biden to tenuous accusations of shady Ukrainian business dealings by including a photo of the former VP alongside his son Hunter and former Ukrainian gas executive Devon Archer.
While the band quickly filed a copyright claim which resulted in the meme being removed, it’s had a positive effect on their popularity.
According to Billboard, the song earned 772,000 on-demand streams (combining audio and video) between October 2-3, which is a 38% gain from the 558,000 streams it recorded on September 30-October 1. This accounts for the likes of YouTube, Apple Music, and Spotify.
Recommended
Digital download sales of ‘Photograph’ also rose on October 2-3 by 569% when compared the previous two days. At the end the week ending October 3, the song had secured 1,000 downloads.
The track was the lead single from Nickelback’s fifth album ‘All the Right Reasons’, which topped the charts upon release in October 2005.
Last week, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic also defended the band after their decision to file a copyright claim prompted criticism from Fox News.