Trump and bunch of Jan 6 prisoners have made it to the top of the iTunes chart

Miley Cyrus has finally been toppled from the top of the iTunes chart, but her replacement is far from your standard pop hit.

Miley’s ‘Flowers’ has been usurped by ‘Justice for All’ – a single by the J6 Prison Choir featuring none other than Donald Trump.

The prison choir is made up of men who were convicted over their participation in the US Capitol attack back in January 2021, and the tune is as militantly “patriotic” as you’d expect.

It centres on a “haunting” (read: tinny and echoey) rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, cutting to excerpts of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before ending with that most inevitable of chants: “USA! USA! USA! (etc.)

The former president recorded his part of the track at his Mar-a-Lago home as a tribute to his incarcerated supporters, CNNreports.

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More than 1,000 people have been charged over the Jan 6 riot, with some 335 participants so far convicted and sentenced over their role in the deadly siege.

And whilst the J6 troop must be patting themselves on the backs for their iTunes triumph, their success on the Apple chart doesn’t mean it’s going to be a hit elsewhere.

Paid downloads now make up just a tiny fraction of the music market – with streaming the real behemoth of the industry – and ‘Justice for All’ was nowhere to be seen on Spotify’s USA Top 50 list of streamed songs at the time of writing.

Also, as Varietypoints out, political songs often do well on iTunes, where it usually takes only a few thousand sales a day to rise to the top of the chart – as Kid Rock’s anti-Biden anthem ‘We the People’, and YG’s ‘FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)’ proved in 2022 and 2020 respectively.

YouTube offers another illustration of the misleading nature of iTunes success. The J6 choir’s number-one hit racked up 540,000 views on the platform in 10 days, whilst the official video for its predecessor, ‘Flowers’, has been viewed almost 300 million times in two months.

Justice for Allyoutu.be

Clearly, not all top tunes are created equal.

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