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What are the most successful social media "quarantine challenges"?
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The Composers in Quarantine Challenge

Famous songwriters including Andrew Lloyd Webber and Nile Rodgers challenge each other to play each other's compositions.
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The Argument

The “Composers in Quarantine Challenge” consists of famous songwriters challenging each other to play each other’s difficult compositions. At the start of the challenge videos, the composers address one another. For instance, in Nile Rodgers’ challenge video, he addresses Andrew Lloyd Weber and tells him that he wants to play a song of his that’ll make him laugh. Rodgers also explains the challenge before going into his rendition of a Cats song. Nile Rodgers and Andrew LLoyd Webber’s contributions to this challenge are definitely the most notable. Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of the most popular Western composers of musical theatre music. Some of his greatest works are the scores for The Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita, and The Likes of Us.[1] Nile Rodgers is a popular American guitarist, singer-songwriter, record producer, and composer. He has won three Grammy awards and is the chairman of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Rodgers has worked with pop superstars such as David Bowie, Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga, and Daft Punk.[2] To have the likes of these two incredibly prominent composers working together is an incredible success. Seeing their two very different backgrounds collide in their renditions of each others’ music is a true creative gift for fans. Additionally, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton, joined in this challenge recently. To have all three of these musical powerhouses interacting with each other's work is a grand success. At least for fans of these three, this challenge is the greatest success to come out of the quarantine social media challenges.

Counter arguments

This challenge has gotten extremely little media coverage or social media buzz in comparison to other social media challenges that have gone viral, such as the Savage Challenge or the Flip the Switch Challenge. Only people who already had interest in Andrew Lloyd Webber, Nile Rodgers, or Lin Manuel Miranda would have interest in this challenge. This is because this challenge completely revolves around the music that these three have already composed, so this challenge holds basically no appeal to people who are unfamiliar with any of these composers' music. It won't excite someone who doesn't know the musical Cats to see Nile Rodgers perform a song from Cats. Even if you are someone who is familiar with one of the composer's music, if you're unfamiliar with the other composers, this challenge won't be interesting either. Even if you're a huge fan of Nile Rodgers, you may not get a kick out of seeing him perform Cats because you have no idea what Cats is, or otherwise no interest in Cats. Though there's quite a bit of crossover in fans of Lin Manuel Miranda and Andrew Lloyd Webber, since both are Broadway composers, there isn't necessarily a huge crossover since they reside in very different corners of musical theatre, since Webber is very classical, traditional musical theatre, and Miranda is an innovator who incorporates rap and hip-hop into his shows. There also likely isn't a big crossover between fans of Rodgers and fans of Miranda or Webber. So, the amount of people who can actually enjoy this challenge is very low. This challenge is also possibly the least accessible challenge on social media. Literally the only people who can participate in this challenge are famous composers with big public followings of people who are familiar with their music. Even then, it seems like you need to have the acknowledgement of one of the original three for the public to take any interest in your take on the challenge. No regular person, not even a huge fan of Webber or Rodgers, could participate in this challenge. This inaccessibility has also contributed to the challenge's lack of popularity. How can a challenge go viral if only a very select few people can participate in it? It simply can't, because most social media challenges get media coverage due to large amounts of participants, in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands. If public interest, popularity, and amount of participants in a challenge are at all relevant to a challenge's success, this challenge is by far the least successful of all the social media challenges listed.

Premises

Rejecting the premises

References

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lloyd_Webber#Shows
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile_Rodgers
This page was last edited on Friday, 26 Jun 2020 at 19:07 UTC

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