Given the success that some YouTube
“stars” have
had it’s not
surprising that some
record labels would try to get around the process and create
a YouTube “sensation” out of whole cloth.
While Dutch singer Esmee Denters
was signed to a boutique label run by Justin Timberlake, and Ysabella
Brave
also signed to a recording contract after being seen on YouTube, now it
seems the video sharing site is being used to foster publicity.
That appears to be what happened with Marie Digby, a young
singer
who was recently signed to a recording contract with Disney’s
Hollywood
Records.
Already Working With Record Company
According to a
story in the Wall Street Journal,
the 24-year-old singer was already working with the record company
before posting any of her cover versions of popular songs to the
video-sharing site.
Her appearances on TV shows and radio shows, for example
— which apparently occurred after they saw
her
YouTube videos
— were booked through a record company executive, and the
story says
that the record label was also involved in choosing the songs she
posted to YouTube.
Crass? Yes. Surprising? Hardly. As Wall Street Journal blogger
Kara Swisher put
it: “Hollywood lies again; also just in —
birds fly, fish swim.”
For many YouTube watchers a big part of the appeal of finding
someone like Ms. Digby is that they are outside the traditional
star-making machinery, and are therefore more authentic and
natural.
To
find out that this isn’t the case often ruins the magic
(although
Lonelygirl15 continued to be popular once it was revealed to be fake).
Sandi Thom Did It First
Ms. Digby isn’t even the first to be involved in
such a scheme: last
year, a Scottish singer named Sandi Thom appeared on the scene, playing
songs with her band from her apartment and streaming them over the
Internet.
After attracting as many as 100,000 viewers (allegedly)
she was signed to a recording contract — except, of course,
that she
had already
been signed to a contract before the performances began.
In a post on her MySpace
blog,
Ms. Digby maintains that the Wall Street Journal story was blown out of
proportion (although she doesn’t deny that she was working
with a
record company before posting her material to YouTube). She says:
“Here’s Lesson 1 for me in Media – The
writer will use
whatever quote he wants of yours to make it fit his
‘angle’. This loser
was desperate for a good story… he knew what he wanted to
write before
he ever even talked to me.The guy’s angle is this : that I am a complete
phony and fake and a
pawn of my record label in some brilliant marketing scheme. IS this guy
completely insane. You think it’s that easy? That you get
signed and
suddenly everything’s taken care of for you!!!??”
Ms. Digby goes on to say that:
“What hurts the most is that this loser took every
genuine thing i said and made it sound like I am acting, that this
whole thing is scripted. The dude is desperate to be onto the next
‘
lonely girl’ or whatever.. i’ve actually never
seeen that but its
obvious that’s what he wanted me to be.”
Although some commenters on MySpace and YouTube have denounced
her as a fraud, a number of fans have posted comments of support.
Conclusions
Is Ms. Digby a fake? That’s difficult to say. Her
version of events
seems to be that she developed the YouTube campaign in an attempt to
keep the record company’s interest, while the WSJ tries to
make the
case that the whole thing was orchestrated by the label.
The bottom
line is that we may never know the “real” story,
now that YouTube has
become a subsidiary of the Hollywood department of smoke and mirrors.
Jonathan Coulton — who refers to himself as an
“authentic Internet superstar” — has some
perspective on Ms. Digby on
his blog, in which he describes her as being
“clotheslined by the thin line between grassroots and
astroturf.” Nice line.
Written by Mathew Ingram, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the intersection between media and the web at MathewIngram.com. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.
