Keep smiling, it confuses people even more

The Sandi Thom story has taken a number of twists and turns. For those of you who didn’t see it first time round, here’s what I posted.

Looked like a classic internet basement-artist-made-good story. And I even mentioned her in other more recent posts, including the last one on Ian Anderson.

Then I saw the comment from Adrian du Plessis, which I reproduce below in its entirety. Thanks for the heads-up, Adrian, even if my stance makes no sense to you….

Start of comment:

Adrian Says:
April 13th, 2006 at 12:57 am e

I know we’ve all wished the Sandi Thom story was a sign of new thinking in the music biz, but, it just doesn’t like that way:

http://www.coolfer.com/blog/archives/2006/04/suckers_thom_st_1.php

http://chartreuse.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/sandi-thom-vs-chuck-d-or-welcome-to-the-death-of-hype/

http://www.velvetrope.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB1&Number=770385&page=3&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=2&fpart=1

still, we can build the revolution ( :

End of comment

So I went around the sites and followed the threads and did my next bit of due diligence. [The first bit of due diligence was to follow the story from the web to her site, to listen to the music, to read more about her and then to blog the story].

And it’s interesting. Here’s my summary: [For those of you who want to see what was on the chartreuse blog, click here]

• There is evidence she signed a publishing contract last year with Windswept/Pacific Music Publishing, who are not small.
• But this is not a recording contract, just a publishing one.
• There is evidence that she signed a contract with Sony only after the live webcasts. This is a recording contract.
• There is evidence she did the webcasts. Alexa says the traffic did not show. But that means nothing to me.
• There is evidence she has talent. At least to me there is.
• So maybe I’ve been conned. And maybe a good PR firm managed to break into slashdotland and start the rumours. And maybe she’s as real as Milli Vanilli.
• But from what I can see everything remains consistent. None so blind as those who will not see? No, I just like seeing good in people.

And so I am going to do the Ernest Hemingway thing and trust Sandi for now.

As he said “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them“

An aside:

There’s an intriguing dog-that-did-not-bark angle here. One of the comments I read said something like “How come 2 million people tuned in and there wasn’t a single mention on a blog?”

There are many inaccuracies but the point remains valid. The figures I have seen in MSM say 200,000 not 2 million, and worldwide at that. slashdot is not exactly miles away from the blogosphere, so there was activity there. And if there was a big PR agency involved all the way, surely they could have set up a technorati tag for Sandi and for that matter a wikipedia entry as well.

So I still go back to: I think she’s real, and that the story is real, and that people are reacting to smart PR guys “corrupting” a real internet story. Alexa and Windswept are not enough for me to stop smiling. But fewer teeth are showing now, that’s for sure.

If I am interested in learning, I am interested in being wrong and shown to be wrong. Goes with the territory. So maybe I will be proven wrong on this one. But I will learn.