Making a song and dance

Don't believe all you read about web-driven musical phenomenons. Old-fashioned PR and marketing still have a big part to play in their success. Adam Webb reports

Thursday May 25, 2006
The Guardian


Arctic Monkeys ... the traditional elements behind the band's success have been overlooked in all the online hyperbole



Viewers of "The Online Music Revolution" on BBC2's The Money Programme last week could be forgiven for believing that the end is nigh for the record labels. Caught napping by Napster, ill-prepared for the iPod and faced with losing a generation of music lovers, the four major labels had missed the digital boat. They were reduced to chasing nine-year-old illegal file sharers, while even old hands like Mick Hucknall, with his autonomous label Simply Red.com, ran rings round them. In the words of presenter Max Flint, "This technology is shaking the industry to its core."
As the programme illustrated, few could have failed to notice the number of web-related artists hitting the headlines over the past year - Arctic Monkeys, whose first-week album sales topped 363,735; Gnarls Barkley, whose debut single Crazy was the first UK No 1 single to be achieved by download sales alone; and JCB fans Nizlopi, whose self-released single topped the charts last December.

Then there's Sandi Thom, whom newspapers have hailed as a webcasting phenomenon, broadcasting to the world - and signing a record deal - from her basement in Tooting, south London. And how about Lily Allen, whose website and songs surely led to a record deal with EMI?

What all these stories actually demonstrate is that the labels have adapted much more quickly to the new technology of the internet as a means for boosting artists than the media. For when you examine each in detail, you find the music business letting the media believe what it wants to about the "bottom-up" internet - and hiding the top-down PR at which record companies have excelled for decades.

At the heart of this music revolution, declared The Money Programme, was a social networking website called MySpace. "With the boost from MySpace, the Arctic Monkeys proved yet again that successful bands can do without big record companies. They released their debut single and album on small independent label Domino. Both went straight to No 1."

Limited release

In fact the Monkeys' first release was a limited seven-inch vinyl single on Bang Bang Records. Domino, far from being the fledgling start-up operation, had already brought Franz Ferdinand to international prominence. Another thing: the Monkeys' have never had an official MySpace site.

Yes, there is an Arctic Monkeys page on MySpace, set up last August. But as the disclaimer makes clear, it is a fan site, unconnected to the band or management.

According to Johnny Bradshaw, the Monkeys' product manager at Domino, the band didn't even know what MySpace was until three months ago.

"There's so much confusion about how the Arctic Monkeys got their music out there in the first place," he says. "They handed out 50 CD-Rs at the early shows to a small group of fans. As the fans started file sharing them, that's how it spread over the internet. It was word of mouth."

The MySpace connection is, he says, media-derived. "Nobody can genuinely get their heads round it when a phenomenon [like the Arctic Monkeys] happens every 10 years, so people try and over-analyse it and find more erudite reasons as to why this thing happened.

"The media need to make the populace join the dots and this is a very easy way of doing that - so people think that MySpace and Arctic Monkeys makes sense, even though it's not true. This music simply connected with the masses. That's it."

Beneath the online hyperbole, the more traditional elements behind the band's success (record label, management, press agent, distribution, major publishing deal) have been overlooked.

And while the notion of unsigned artists circumventing radio and television and "shaking the major record labels to their core" is a romantic one, whether it's happening to the degree being portrayed in the media is another matter entirely.

In fact, could it be the idea of the internet, rather than the internet itself, that is driving exposure of emerging artists?

"I think the word 'internet' and to a lesser extent, the word 'MySpace' can become shorthand for fresh, new and exciting," explains Gareth Grundy, deputy editor of Q magazine. "If you're a record company, and you want to push a new artist, you'll be thinking 'Well, what's the best way to bring these people to their potential audience?', and that will enter into your thinking."

Musical phenomenon

Lily Allen is another artist whose name is typically followed by the phrase "MySpace phenomenon". But while Allen does have a MySpace site - where she blogs regularly, and where her tracks have been listened to more than 1.5m times - it was, as she revealed in a recent Time Out interview, set up after signing a record deal with EMI imprint Regal. She also has a contract with Empire Management (home of Daniel and Natasha Bedingfield) as well as a publishing deal with Universal.

"Something like MySpace has just become another vehicle for people to hear music," acknowledges A&R executive Jamie Nelson, who signed Allen to Regal. "It only has resonance if the music itself is exciting, which I think Lily's music is."

So while one could claim that MySpace is driving interest in Allen, another perspective is that when Jo Whiley plays her music on daytime Radio 1, listeners who like it and Google her name are driven towards MySpace (and another number clocks up on her profile views).

Sandi Thom makes an even more intriguing case study. The Scottish singer-songwriter hit the headlines in early March after webcasting 21 gigs from her Tooting basement on a