Promotion through the net. Creating the buzz and hype

[Snowdrop]

There was an interesting article in The Guardian last week about Sandi Thom, the woman who has just got to number one.

*read it in full here*

An internet superstar - or just another rock'n'roll swindle?

Owen Gibson, media correspondent

Wednesday May 31, 2006

The Guardian

Scottish singer-songwriter Sandi Thom performs her first sell-out headline London show at the Islington Academy Bar. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty

The latest sales figures show her single is likely to be number one by this weekend, but debate yesterday raged over whether singer-songwriter Sandi Thom is a self-made internet superstar or simply the next in a proud tradition of rock'n'roll PR swindles.

Thom has been compared to Janis Joplin and KT Tunstall and, according to the reams of press cuttings that accompanied her rise, was penniless and struggling until she secured a £1m deal with RCA Records by webcasting 21 gigs from her Tooting basement. But amid accusations that the webcast stunt was part of a contrived PR campaign, a Cambridge-based PR company yesterday confirmed it had been working with her since last June to boost her profile ahead of the release of her single I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair), now at number two in the charts.

Quite Great, which has worked for the likes of Mariah Carey and Chris Rea as well as unsigned bands, said it had helped place articles in national newspapers and worked to create a "buzz" around the artist. Its tactics, common among most music PRs, included targeting the student press and employing paid and unpaid groups of enthusiasts known as street teams together with the internet to spread the word about the Scottish singer-songwriter. "You can't just rely on good music," said Louise Harris, PR manager at Quite Great. "For unsigned artists it's really important to have the fans and the street teams out there talking about them."

Paul Scaife, managing director of industry newsletter Record of the Day, whose messageboard contributors have tracked the controversy, said: "It seems that even the record label are now admitting the story created the story and they've all done well out of that."

Since Thom's story first appeared in the Sunday Times in March, an army of bloggers have chipped away at press claims that she was a penniless, desperate singer who turned to the internet after her car broke down on the way back from yet another sparsely attended gig.

They pointed to her publishing deal with Windswept Pacific Music (home of Beyonce Knowles), her collaborations with well-known songwriters, her professionally produced website and the track record of her manager Ian Brown in promoting a number of other unlikely success stories. They also reproduced statistics from web tracking services such as Technorati showing there was little interest in her website until the first stories appeared in the London Evening Standard and the Sunday Times. "All we wanted to do was get her to a place where she could be taken to the national press," said Ms Harris. "Then it all kicked off. There's no big mystery." Once Thom was signed by RCA, which has been promoting her single around the country with posters hailing "the singer who webcast to the world from her Tooting basement", its own press department took over.

Mr Brown accepted that the story became inflated through an unholy alliance of the media, the artist and the record label. He said the idea for "21 Nights From Tooting", the series of gigs recorded in her basement and webcast at 9pm every night in lieu of a traditional tour, had definitely come from Thom. Fans were initially intrigued because of an email marketing campaign that saw 1m virtual flyers sent out promoting the free online gigs, he said, leading to record company interest.

"We had every major record company in this piss-stained basement in Tooting. If it was orchestrated we'd have done the gigs from Chelsea, not a flat two doors down from the Halal butchers," said Mr Brown, rejecting the claims. "It was genuinely an innocent little thing to do and people watched it." A friend of a friend put him in touch with Streaming Tank, a large online company that agreed to handle the hefty bandwidth requirements, while he also contacted the Sunday Times journalist, he said. Another friend, a radio plugger in the US, emailed 2,000 radio stations on Thom's behalf.

Although the numbers had since been inflated, Mr Brown said the gigs started off with 600 viewers before hitting 48,000 prior to any press coverage. It was 10 days after the web gigs finished that RCA won the race to sign her up, he said. Far from providing small, unsigned artists with the means to bypass major labels, the tale of Sandi Thom suggests that major labels have swapped their early panic over internet piracy for a sophistication in using it to promote new artists that has overtaken the media's ability to sniff out a PR stunt.

As Mr Brown said, clever PR is not unique to the internet age. The uneasy alliance between the press and music PRs dates back to Elvis Presley. As such, it is unlikely that either label or artist will balk at the latest round of publicity. "It's all rock'n'roll PR," he said. "But it starts off with a fact. Bill Grundy told the Pistols to swear on TV. Fact. Sandi Thom got 50,000 people on her website before the Sunday Times had anything to do with it. Fact. What happens after that, I've got no idea."

Made in cyberspace

Famous in 15 seconds, famous for 15 seconds?

The Libertines

Back when Pete Doherty was better known for his music than his court appearances, he and bandmate Carl Barat set the template for many of today's internet-assisted stars by giving away demos and rehearsals online. Labels, noticing that their sales didn't suffer as a result, subsequently began looking more seriously at how to use the web as a promotional tool.

Arctic Monkeys

Press legend has it that the Sheffield band behind the fastest selling debut album in chart history used the internet to their advantage to bypass traditional marketing routes. In fact it was early fans who shared demo CDs online and via sites like MySpace, building a massive live fanbase prior to their first full release. The band claimed not to have known what MySpace was until three months ago.

Lily Allen

Has been described as the next MySpace superstar on the basis of her popularity on the site. She was already signed to Parlophone before she put her infectious ska-pop songs and profile on MySpace, the popular social networking site. She told Observer Music Monthly that "no one could have anticipated the level of attention I'm getting now, and that's purely because of the internet" but added: "I don't want to be any kind of poster-girl and I don't really want to talk about it any more."

N1kki

Another Quite Great client, this 17-year-old pop singer is aiming to replicate the success of Sandi Thom by webcasting a daily online TV show from his bedroom. Combining the PR potential of the internet with more tried and trusted methods, the stage school graduate has also toured primary schools around the country to promote his next single.

I think it goes to show that good PR goes far, far beyond official press releases, and arguably the best promotion is when people don't realise the professionals are involved. I've lost count of the number of times I've read people say how stupid we are for liking someone like Gareth having been conned into liking him - after watching him sing live on live unedited tv week after week. Unlike those who like whoever it is that the NME says is cool - they really think for themselves.

[mark4]

instresting read took a couple of minutes but very intresting.

[Khelda]

Very interesting read and it just shows that all artists or at least their image is somehow controlled or made by companies.