Unknown singer Sandi Thom's big break came when her impromptu webcam performance attracted 100,000 viewers - or so the story goes, writes Brian Boyd
Dreams do come true. Just ask Sandi Thom, a 24-year-old Scottish musician, who has just gone from being a totally unknown, struggling artist to becoming the number one selling act in the UK singles chart. And it's all because of the £60 (€87) she spent on a webcam.
Earlier this year, the unknown Thom was setting off for the long drive from her London home to a cheap gig she had in a pub in north Wales. A few miles into the journey and Thom's battered old car clapped out. She phoned her manager and told him, "I can't make it to the gig, but I have an idea". Thom went back to her basement flat in Tooting, south London, sat down on the threadbare carpet with her old guitar and her webcam, and performed a "gig" that was transmitted live on the internet.
More than 100,000 people watched Thom's novel gig. Her live audience included viewers from Brazil, Russia and Mexico. So impressed were viewers by the folksy little show from the bedsit that they burnt up the blogosphere talking about what an amazing talent Sandi Thom was. Word soon reached the offices of record companies and Thom now has a £1 million (€1,458,000) recording deal with Sony Records. And all because her little beat-up car broke down on the motorway.
Most members of the media reported the story as above. The truth is that it had been cut up and fed to them by a PR company. This emerged after people reading the story as reported wondered how come such a struggling artist could afford to pay for so much bandwidth for 100,000 concurrent live streams.
A bit more digging revealed that Thom was a client of a PR company called Quite Great. Other clients of Quite Great include Mariah Carey, Simply Red and Stevie Wonder. The PR company specialises in innovative marketing techniques such as "ghost marketing" - whereby it leaves CDs of its new, unknown clients around coffee shops and other public places for people to pick up "by accident". It also emerged that the "struggling" Thom already had a publishing deal for her songs and was managed by Ian Brown (not the singer) who has a very good reputation in the music business for breaking unlikely success stories.
Despite, or because of, all this information becoming available, Thom was still offered the lucrative recording deal by Sony (that bit is true) and she will be at number one tomorrow with her song, I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair) when the UK singles chart is announced.
It remains quite plausible that Thom's car did break down and she did decide to put her gig up free on the internet. The spin begins with how her PR company fed the media what appear to be highly imaginative figures about how many people saw the gig online. The fact that most music journalists reported the story as the PR company gave it to them tells you all to need to know about music and entertainment journalism and how it is presented in a lot of the media.
What really gave this story legs, though, was the fact that the PR company had insinuated that Thom was an "internet discovery" - in that her name was whizzing around pages on the net and she had built up a profile well in advance of her webcam gig. The timing here was perfect: over the last year, a number of music acts have bypassed the traditional marketing and media routes and gone instead for a word-of-mouth-on-the-net approach.
The biggest selling British act so far this year is the Arctic Monkeys, who actually did build up a considerable internet profile before releasing their first single. They did this by handing out home-made CDs of their demo material to fans after their early gigs. Their fans then file-shared the demos so that a worldwide audience could hear the band for free and were primed to buy the official album when it was released.
Thom's PR company simply capitalised on the lack of knowledge among the print media about this new way of building up an artist - and it did it (in PR terms) brilliantly.
Thom's manager, Ian Brown, now accepts the story became "inflated", but still insists it was Thom's idea to transmit her gig on the net from her flat. No one is sure exactly how many people actually saw the gig, but it is known that there was an e-mail marketing campaign that saw one million "flyers" sent out promoting Thom's gig.
Of very much secondary importance here is whether Thom's material is any good. No, not really - it sounds like an even more insipid version of KT Tunstall. But then why should the music get in the way of a good PR story?