A New Way to hit the bigtime!

Image by six steps  via Flickr

For most of the twentieth century, the only way an artist could expect to be successful was to go on tour and hope to gain a massive following. Today, the smartest labels have found that often the best way to break an artist is through media whether it be placing a song in the trailer of a movie or placing a song in a commercial. Less than a year ago Old Navy aired a commercial of a girl dancing to a catchy tune about a sweater. Immediately people searched online for this “Sweater song” they had heard in their new favorite commercial. Needless to say, Ingrid Michaelson, the relatively unknown singer who wrote this song , was suddenly catapulted to stardom. Her “Sweater song” was among the most popular songs downloaded from I tunes that month, exceeding over 500,000 downloads!
Just a few months ago, my brother and I went to Charlottesville to write with a dear friend and talented musician Chris Keup. It just so happened that the singer, of the band Parachute, was using Chris’ studio that very day, to lay down an acoustic love song he had been working on. Several months later I heard the song again, except this time it was playing in a Nivea commercial. Their daily hits on myspace immediately shot from one hundred to a staggering 15,000 plays.
Just as big businesses are forced to reevaluate their policies in order to prosper in an age where media convergence plays a huge role in success, so are record industries forced to discover alternate paths of reaching an entirely new audience whom prefers to discover music in the comfort of their homes more than say going to a concert, or rummaging through a record store. This has led to a dramatic shift in the top employees of record labels, many of the older, technologically impaired “top dogs” swiftly replaced by bright, creative individuals aware of unique and imaginative ways of reaching the new demographic of people whose eyes stay glued to the t.v or computer screen.