Fairy Bones' Billboard Bid Falls Short — for Now

On the same Wednesday morning that two special elections in Georgia and South Carolina were lost by narrow margins, the Fairy Bones found out they came up short in their bid to get their latest single, "No One Can Suffer Like I Can," onto Billboard's Heatseeker chart. In order to do this, the band would have had to rack up 500 downloads in its first week.

The final tally estimates that there were 300 sales of "No One Can Suffer Like I Can" in the first week of its release and 700 streams on Spotify.

It was not for lack of reaching out. Short of kissing babies and shaking hands at busy street intersections, the band pushed hard, premiering the song on KWSS 93.9FM during Dani Cutler's show, then getting the song spun on Alt AZ 93.3FM with Mo. Fox 10 even came out to interview the band about the release as a news feature.

"We're at about 800 streams on YouTube," Fairy Bones singer Chelsey Louise says. "It has been incredible seeing this song that we've been working on for over a year reach so many people with so much enthusiasm. We hoped this would go well; we didn't expect it to go great! We have an amazing community in Phoenix."

Though the band's bid to reach the Heatseekers chart didn't pan out this time, it was by no means a total loss.

"We certainly made it on the Soundscan charts, and we are seeking that information right now," Louise says. "Once we get it, we will make it public."

Technically, they still made it into Billboard.

The immediate question of whether this affects the momentum of the single will have to be answered by the release of the video for "No One Can Suffer Like I Can," which will be premiering through Impose, a blog based in New York at the end of the month. It may or may not be a second wind for the song.

"Time will tell, but we're doing everything we can to give it a shot," says Louise. "It will likely give the single another gentle nudge into public consciousness, this time to cities other than Phoenix. This is our home, this is where we started, this song has a meaning related to Phoenix. The Valley was meant to hear the song first, whether y'all wanted it or not, and now it's time to unleash it everywhere else."

Wednesday morning quarterbacking aside, what would Fairy Bones might do differently with the next single or the upcoming 0%Fun album?

"We would definitely have given a lot more time to preparation," she says. "We sort of came up with the idea late in the game and threw it all together. Sam [our manager] and I are pretty good at running at an idea head on with reckless abandon. Making mistakes is part of the learning process. Stuff I think labels would normally do. Preorders are key to first-week sales numbers. If anyone else is going to try this, definitely start getting orders in ASAP because presales count. We promoted preorders for about 48 hours prior to release. That's basically no time at all."

The band is armed with more knowledge about BMI, ASCAP, Soundscan, and the Billboard charts than they were when this campaign started.

"At the end of the week, we sold roughly 300 songs. This is 2017, where people don't buy music and marketing is for labels, [and yet] 300 real live people heard us and made a decision to buy one of our songs,"  Louise says.

To put that into perspective, on the Heatseekers chart this week are two English bands you might have heard of, Slowdive and Saint Etienne. They have been kicking around since 1989 and 1991, respectively.