There’s a Colonel Parker behind every MySpace phenom!
1May 30, 2006 by Colin
Over at the Guardian, they’re doing their best to chip away at the public relations-driven perception that the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen and Sandi Thom are bootstrap successes who pooled together their credit card balances to record some demos before riding the popularity of MySpace and the internets to sucess, fame and fortune.
They ran a great big honking rebuttal of the MySpace trend pieces last Thursday.
We’ll leave the last word to Sandi Thom’s manager, Ian Brown:
” … As Mr. Brown said, clever PR is not unique to the internet age. The uneasy alliance between the press and music PRs dates back to Elvis Presley. As such, it is unlikely that either label or artist will balk at the latest round of publicity. “It’s all rock’n'roll PR,” he said. “But it starts off with a fact. Bill Grundy told the Pistols to swear on TV. Fact. Sandi Thom got 50,000 people on her website before the Sunday Times had anything to do with it. Fact. What happens after that, I’ve got no idea.” (Guardian)
Of course, if Colonel Brown was correct in claiming 50,000 webcast viewers, it’d be a different story…