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Lights, MySpace, action: Budding indie star Lights harnessed the power of social media to kick-start her career |
Valerie Poxleitner isn’t famous. At least not yet. But the 21-year-old singer-songwriter, known to her fans as Lights, already knows what it feels like to be a star.
That feeling washed over her earlier this year when she travelled to Buenos Aires to film an Old Navy commercial featuring one of her songs. Exhausted from a 20-hour trip, Poxleitner was rejuvenated when she arrived on set to find her song blaring through several city blocks shut down for the shoot. “It was one of the nicest moments in my life, seeing everyone working to my music in this city that was closed down,” she gushes.
But the story of how a small-town Ontario girl with an ear for pop hooks and electronic instrumentation ended up in South America shooting an ad for a huge clothing retailer wasn’t set in motion by an aggressive push from a record label or a persistent manager. Rather, it began on MySpace, where Poxleitner set up her page in April 2006, one of more than five million artists-260,000 of them Canadian-with a music profile on the popular social media site. Less than a year later, an artistic director from Old Navy’s marketing department discovered her songs on the site and became a fan. Between February and May of this year, four of her songs were used in Old Navy ads and Poxleitner starred in one of the spots. The result: This summer she signed a record deal with Warner Music International.
Poxleitner’s tale is an example from a music marketing textbook that is still being written. Meanwhile, the old textbook-a dusty old parchment that touts the physical recorded music product as paramount and insists that dozens of intermediaries be placed between artists and fans-is crumbling. With CD sales declining, major record labels have fewer resources to develop artists. And with more direct-to-consumer channels like MySpace available, artists hardly need the labels for support. In the new music economy, musicians have more power than ever before. And they also have more responsibility when it comes to marketing.
Not that aspiring rock stars need to take advanced business courses to succeed. Many will find, as Poxleitner did, that simply communicating with fans-online and in person-pays dividends. “I hate calling them fans,” she says. “I’d rather them see me as a friend, because that way they’re more invested in my music and what I’m putting out there.” For Poxleitner, making friends on MySpace means making her music available, showcasing her artistic talents (she’s responsible for the designs on her merchandise and EP covers), posting regular blog entries, responding to comments from visitors and even sharing her love of the role-playing video game World of Warcraft.
Since starting her Lights page, Poxleitner has consistently ranked among the most-visited Canadian independent artists on the MySpace network (almost 3.5 million people have viewed her profile). “Ten years ago, an indie band couldn’t have reached the world the way that she can through her MySpace page, and if you’ve got the songs that resonate, the people will come,” says Jian Ghomeshi, Poxleitner’s manager.
A respected music commentator for CBC Radio One and a former member of Canadian indie band Moxy Früvous, Ghomeshi has witnessed the evolution of the music industry from multiple angles. He appreciates how Poxleitner has harnessed the marketing power of social media. “[She] instinctively knows that the more people she brings on board, the more she’ll be able to call her own shots.”
In the major labels’ heyday, artists almost never had this kind of control. Record companies were the gatekeepers to the radio stations, VJs and record stores that acts needed to succeed. But radio and music videos are no longer necessary steps to stardom. And selling records no longer makes or breaks a career. “No label could have done what we’ve done, finding those 3.5 million people,” says Ghomeshi. “We didn’t have an incentive to sign unless it was the right deal.”
Like Ghomeshi, David Usher, former frontman of the Canadian alt-rock band Moist and now a successful solo artist, has watched the music industry change dramatically since his professional career began in 1992. “The traditional music business model was that you write a record, you produce the record and you release the record, and you hide everything until that moment of release,” Usher says. “All your attention and all your company’s attention is focused on that one moment, when you spend the advertising dollars and try to get as much attention as possible from mass media. That’s very different from what we do now.”
Today, Usher talks directly to his fans through his website and blog. He even releases songs in various stages of completion online-a huge no-no in the old-world of music marketing. “That’s sort of the way music is going, where the creative process needs to be open and shared and added to,” he says.
Once Usher learned that he could keep in contact with his fans in real time, he started to trust himself to do a better job than a major label. His past three records, including a new album out this fall, have been released through Toronto-based Maple Music (Universal Music Group handles distribution). The eight-year-old label offers an à la carte menu of services, including recording, distribution, publishing, management, CD and concert ticket sales, promotion and marketing.
Maple could be considered a prototype for the 21st-century record company. Whether a musician needs the full treatment or just help building an online fan community, Maple can adapt itself to the task. Founder Grant Dexter says he fashioned Maple Music on ideas he got talking to musicians about what they needed from a record label. “What I took out of it was that there’s an artist and there’s a fan, and there can be a one-to-one relationship between the two, but right now there are too many people in the way: Ticketmaster, agents, promoters, record labels, publishers-all these people standing in between those two constituents,” Dexter explains. “The more we can act as an enabler for those fans and artists to hook up and interact, the more money there is to be made for everybody.”
Dexter says his company’s philosophy is to invest money and time to ensure an act’s success and then divide the spoils. “We’re not going to give you a lot of money up front, but you’ll see a lot on the back end,” he says. “It’s shared risk, shared reward-we’ll share the back end with you but don’t kill us from the front end.”
Traditional record labels are trying hard to remodel themselves in the style of Maple, with many now offering so-called “360” deals, in which the label manages not only the recordings, but also merchandise sales and concerts. Usher, for one, can’t understand why a musician would give up a sizable cut from touring and merchandise-which offer much higher revenue percentages to artists-to large companies without a track record in those areas. “They want a piece of your merch, they want a piece of your digital and they want a piece of your touring. But they don’t have any expertise or infrastructure in merchandise or digital or touring,” he says.
If anything, new artists are better off dealing with publishing companies than major labels. In the past decade, publishers have filled the vacuum left by weakening record labels and have poured more money into artist development and marketing. Lights, for example, was nurtured by Sony/ATV before she started her MySpace page, and hard rockers Alexisonfire recorded their debut album not with a major label, but at the studio operated by EMI Music Publishing Canada.
Catherine Saxberg, executive director of the Canadian Music Publishers’ Association, says publishers are better positioned than labels to adjust to the new music industry climate, since they deal in copyright, not hard-copy product. “Moving to a digital world isn’t such a big paradigm shift. We’ve always dealt in something esoteric and ephemeral-you can’t hold what we own,” she says. “What’s been challenging for the labels is that they’ve been in the business of selling shiny round things.”
Five years ago, says EMI Music Publishing Canada president Michael McCarty, the sale of shiny round things accounted for roughly 60% of his company’s revenues. Now, he says, CD sales account for about one third, which means more emphasis on licensing songs to commercials, television shows and movies.
Even if a publishing company doesn’t make an artist a star, it can help them earn a steady living in the music business. McCarty points to Andrea Wasse, a songwriter whose band EMI Music Publishing signed several years ago. The band is now defunct, but EMI has helped Wasse’s songs get play in major U.S. film and television properties like Freaky Friday and Lipstick Jungle. The licensing deals have provided financial cover, and mainstream exposure, for Wasse while she builds a solo career.
The age of major-label dominance in marketing is over, and artists are free to explore the world of social media to connect directly with fans and put together more creative deals with publishing companies and new-age hybrids like Maple Music. But they need to think carefully about how they proceed. “An artist has considerably more options, but the artists themselves have to be considerably more knowledgeable about the business in order to choose the options that are best for them,” says Saxberg.
Some musicians might balk at having to make such exciting and terrifying choices. But then, rock ‘n’ roll was always supposed to be exciting and terrifying.
