This article is part of the meta-post 4169 Words Mostly Mine or How George Allen Is A Racist Biggot. This article covers Sandi Thom and how she went from a webcam to a record deal. It’s the new media.
How Londoner Sandi Thom got her record deal thanks to new media. The singer/songwriter used a virtual tour of 21 cities to generate interest. The audience of these live concerts started up at around 70 and blossomed into 70000 by the end of the cybertour. This is new media, how online can influence offline. Because of this, she has signed a lucrative record deal with RCA for five albums.
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.
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It is also part of the meta-post 4169 Words Mostly Mine or How George Allen Is A Racist Biggot.
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