Streams & Sales of Nickelback's 'Photograph' Leap After Trump Tweet

The U.S. president tweeted a meme including the song on Oct. 2 that was taken down the following day due to a copyright claim.

U.S. streams and sales for Nickelback’s 2005 song “Photograph” surged following the song’s inclusion in a meme tweeted by President Donald Trump on Oct. 2, according to Nielsen Music.

“LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH!” Trump tweeted accompanying a video of the “Photograph” meme, through which users replace the titular photograph in the song’s music video with a different image. In Trump’s case, the photo included Joe Biden, his son Hunter and, according to a label on the picture, a “Ukrainian gas exec.”

The tweet was well circulated throughout Twitter upon its late Oct. 2 posting, but by the following day, the video in the tweet had been disabled due to a copyright violation claim.

However, that didn’t stop the tweet from making news -- both after its posting and following the copyright takedown. 

The song earned 772,000 on-demand streams (audio and video combined) on Oct. 2-3, a 38% gain from the 558,000 it collected on Sept. 30-Oct. 1. (Streaming numbers include streams from sources like YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify, but not streams from videos shared directly via Twitter's platform.) 

Digital download sales of “Photograph” on Oct. 2-3 were up 569% over the previous two days. However, in both pairs of days, sales were still negligible. In total for the week ending Oct. 3, the song garnered 1,000 downloads. 

“Photograph” was the lead single from All the Right Reasons, Nickelback’s fifth studio album, and a one-week No. 1 on the Billboard 200 dated Oct. 22, 2005 (coincidentally nearly 14 years before the song’s Trump tweet usage).

The song itself marks the Canadian rockers’ second-best rank on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 2 in October 2005, while ruling the Mainstream Rock Songs airplay chart for seven weeks.