Vine’s First Hit: A Year-Old Rap Song Climbs Billboard Charts After Unofficial Video

A Vine video is being credited for helping a year-old rap song sell more than 100,000 downloads in the last two weeks, pushing it into the top five on Billboard’s chart of the top R&B/Hip-Hop digital songs.

It’s believed to be the first time a Vine video has had such a significant role in driving music sales.

As Billboard.com is reporting, the song “Don’t Drop That Thun Thun” by a Los Angeles-based group called FiNATTiCZ saw a sales spike shortly after this unofficial Vine clip — which has been tweeted more than 13,000 times at the moment — was published on July 9th.

(Note: The Vine video that we’ve embedded below might be considered NSFW in some quarters. No nudity, but five females — three in bikinis — dancing “provocatively,” to borrow the word Billboard used to describe it.)

The song was first released in April 2012 on the eOne Music Label. But according to Billboard, the recent video had an immediate impact on the song’s sales.

The week before the initial video went up, the group sold 4,000 copies of “Don’t Drop That.” The week after, sales spiked to 34,000. Last week, it sold 77,000 and moved to No. 5 on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Digital Songs, up from No. 12 the week before. Through the week ending July 7, the song sold a total of 214,000 downloads in 14 months. In the last two weeks alone, it sold an additional 111,000.

Numerous brands have adopted Vine since it launched in January, but this is a case of user-generated marketing via social video, not anything the artist or the record label did. As eOne’s marketing head Chris Herche tells Billboard, “it’s our responsibility as music marketers to make sure we’re aware of what our fans do on social media and help amplify it.”