Following the release of the hit lead single “Love Never Felt So Good” — ”XSCAPE” continued to sell steadily around the world. Thanks to the participation of Justin Timberlake, more than 180 million watched the various versions of “Love Never Felt So Good” — earning Platinum certification from the RIAA for sales exceeding 1 million copies in the United States. The second single officially released by Epic Records was “A Place With No Name” . To put it bluntly, the single was a gigantic failure, with disastrous, misguided and confusing promotion. While “Love Never Felt So Good” was Michael Jackson’s best-performing single in over a decade, “A Place With No Name” was the exact opposite. In fact, “A Place With No Name” was one of Jackson’s worst-performing singles of all time — alongside the posthumous release “Hollywood Tonight / Behind The Mask” in early 2011. Neither single charted on the Billboard Hot 100. Both reached the top of the UK Top 200 — “Hollywood Tonight / Behind The Mask” at #152 and “A Place With No Name” at #172. This, of course, is in no way Michael’s fault Jackson. He is not here to complete his own music and choose the tracks to release or participate in the promotional campaign. Sony/Epic Records and the Estate of Michael Jackson have decided to enter into a social media campaign for the release of the single “A Place With No Name”, allowing Twitter to globally premiere the song’s music video. It was also shown simultaneously on the Sony screen in Times Square, New York.
In my opinion, the decision to launch exclusively through the Twitter player, instead of simply uploading the video to YouTube as usual, was a huge mistake. To begin with, the Twitter player suffered from several bugs. I personally couldn’t watch it and it would freeze every 3–4 seconds. While some fans said they had no problems, others reported that they were unable to watch—not even for a few seconds. If the video had been uploaded to YouTube from day one, and embedded in a post on Michael Jackson’s Facebook page, it would have been exposed to millions of fans. In addition to the video release issues, “A Place With No Name” was not released as a single on iTunes. This was another major downfall of music making any kind of impact on the charts. Immediately after the debut of the hit “Love Never Felt So Good” at the iHeart Radio Music Awards, two versions — the solo version and the JT version — were released on iTunes as singles. The singles could be purchased by fans around the world, and quickly began to climb the Top 10. However, when the “A Place With No Name” video was released, there were no singles available on iTunes for fans could buy. Sony and the Estate simply hoped that the public would seek out the individual track from the ‘XSCAPE’ album. As a consequence of this, along with the fact that Sony did not advertise the single on the iTunes homepage, the track never charted on iTunes, failing to enter the Top 200 in any major market. In the days and weeks following the so-called “release” of “A Place With No Name,” Michael Jackson’s official social media platforms seemingly acted as if it didn’t exist. Instead of encouraging the more than 70 million fans who “like” Michael Jackson’s Facebook page to watch the video and buy the (non-existent) single, those who run the page posted fun facts about other albums. This, although not negative, did not favor the performance of the video “A Place With No Name” or “single”. It was the end of the promotion of the album ”XSCAPE”.
by Damien Shields, writer and Michael Jackson fan
