Added November 2009: Nellie McKay pissed off her record label and they dropped her (or she dropped them). She immediately sort of vanished off the radar screens. What is she doing now? I don't know. I thought she was very promising, but maybe it just didn't pan out. A lot of young artists have one promising album in them... and then they run out of compelling material.
March 24, 2004
Some revisions February 2007
He soon looked at which band under contract he could develop into a hit-maker the fastest. Judging Coldplay the best bet, he pushed its 2001 debut, "Parachutes," which eventually sold two million copies. NY Times, March 22, 2004
It's been a long time since I believed that artists become known because they are talented and interesting. As a child, I thought the process was something like osmosis. The musician writes songs and performs and the talent scout hears the musician play and decides that he or she is singularly remarkable and signs him or her to a contract and then he or she records an album and it is sent to the critics and the radio stations and the best stuff gets promoted and heard on the radio.
No, no, no. It's Mr. Slater, and people like him. They decide which artist is worthy of development. The artist is "developed" and packaged, and marketed. You hear this artist eventually because Mr. Slater decided you would. Maybe you read about the artist in Rolling Stone or Spin and saw him or her perform on Letterman or Leno or Conan O'Brien.
And then you understand why an artist might become bitter when an album they produced fails. You think, it must have been a bad album. They say, no, it's because the record company didn't promote it. You think, surely the record company would have promoted it if it had been any good. Not so. Sometimes they simply decide that even with heavy promotion, a particular album will only sell 500,000 copies. Hardly worth their while, when they might be putting their efforts towards an album that could sell 1 or 2 million copies.
So even artists that produce albums carefully and under budget and consistently make a profit might nevertheless be dropped by their label. That's tough. That is my understanding of what happened to T-Bone Burnett.
On the other hand, the label might invest heavily in an artist like Liz Phair, remake her image and promote her all over the place, and still run into a wall of resistance. It's power is not absolute.
It's hard to judge at times when the public acclaims somebody and when they are simply manipulated into buying a sham. It's not nice to think that you bought that Sarah McLachlan album because a pimp like Andrew Slater decided exactly how to manipulate you, but it possible that that is exactly what happened, except that the pimp's name was actually Terry McBride.
So, while no album, no matter how good, can be a "huge success" (as defined by numbers of units sold) without massive, coordinated promotion, nor can an album become a "huge success" unless it has some kind appeal to begin with-- like Sarah McLachlan's "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy". Was it really all that great? Maybe not. But it was good, and appealing, and McLachlan could be photographed to look sexy, so there it was: a hit.
It is not all that unusual nowadays for an artist to be packaged as "alternative"-- someone who can't be packaged and manipulated. Isn't that exactly how Avril Levigne is packaged?