It's an old story. An unremarkable singer-songwriter flies to the moon, where she builds, at zero gravity, a better mousetrap, all the while being cheered on by mobs of frenzied rooters. The images are beamed directly to desktop computer monitors. Upon her return to earth, skepticism creeps in -- the novel feat was simply too outlandish to believe. Critics heap scorn and contempt; a fresh star is forced to defend herself.
To explain: Freckled, sneaker-wearing Sandi Thom, a 24-year-old Scottish-born Londoner, recently rose to the top of the U.K. singles charts with I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (with Flowers in My Hair), the same tune she had released in 2005 with much less success. A year ago, Thom was an unknown musician signed to a small independent label. Today, she's a cyber-savvy star on a major label. What follows is the story of how one artist used the Internet to her considerable advantage.
Early this year, Thom purchased a $120 webcam, which she used to promote her art (exuberant folk-pop in the vein of Serena Ryder or Tracy Chapman). Tired of making it from gig to gig in her crumbling, black Ford Focus, she began streaming "concerts" on myspace.com from her unadorned basement in Tooting, South London. Each "city" of her 21-night cyber-tour was much the same as the others, except for the use of unexceptional props. A small Eiffel Tower model placed on a coffee table, for example, created the illusion of a Paris-set performance.
The 30-minute concerts may have been streamed out of a "piss-stained basement" that accommodated only six people, but the auditorium that is the World Wide Web was well larger. According to Thom's website, 70 folks tuned in for the first show. The viewership jumped to nearly 700 the second night, and by the end of the "tour," some 70,000 were watching Thom sing songs like When Horsepower Meant What it Said, a rockabilly-style number that laments, perhaps ironically, the furious process of keeping up with progress.
On April 3, after media fur began to fly, Thom went the rags-to-riches route, signing a substantial record deal with RCA for five albums, the first one being Smile. . .It Confuses People (out Sept. 12 in Canada). The inking of the contract was webcast from Thom's now "historic" cellar.
It's a cute story, which now finds itself being poked at. How did a "struggling artist" (as she had been described) pay for the expensive bandwidth required to handle 70,000 simultaneous webcast viewers? (Answer: A company agreed to handle the bandwidth for the webcasts free of charge, to test their systems.) As well, it's now accepted that media hype is what triggered the upsurge in traffic to Thom's site, not any sort of organic word-of-mouth phenomenon.
As for the "impoverished artist" tag, Thom notes that is was the media who portrayed her as the pauper. "The word 'struggling' is a word I've never personally used," she says, with an upbeat Scottish inflection. Thom admits that, before the webcasts, she had already signed a publishing deal that allowed her to live "vaguely comfortably." Subsequent to all the hoopla, it was learned that a public relations agency had spammed up interest in Thom and the webcasts.
"It's about longing for a simpler life," she explains. "There are certain times I want to shut away from the world and turn off every bit of connection I have on my person so nobody could ever reach me, so I could disappear for a bit.
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