From Unknown To Rising Star Via Web

Webcasts Of Shows Gain Sandi Thom A Following And Record Contract

(CBS)  You might describe Sandi Thom as a kind of Janis Joplin-meets-Madonna-meets-Joni-Mitchell wannabee.

You might also describe her as a singer whose future may well be now, thanks to the power of the Internet.

In the music business, explains CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips, you've always needed talent — and maybe a gimmick — to make it. For Thom, he says, that gimmick is the Web.

Fed up with playing small club gigs, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter had an idea: Use a webcam to let the people come to her.

"We just put it in the basement and started putting out the gigs, and I think the appeal for people was just the simplicity of it all," Thom tells Phillips.

It was the musical equivalent of "Build it and they will come."

Thom says the Webcast audiences grew and grew. "After the first night, we had about 700 people. … By the third, fourth night, we were in the thousands, and when it started to rise every night, we thought, 'This is quite a lot of people, you know, 'This would fill a stadium' kind of thing."

At one point, she says, the Webcast was drawing 70,000 people in 15 countries, including a large chunk in the United States.

The Web's musical marketing power, through sites such as Apple's iTunes, is already legendary, Phillips observes. Recent successes of bands such as the Arctic Monkeys, who used the Internet to promote the biggest-selling debut album in British rock history, confirmed the Web's power.

But now, Philips notes, the Internet has also become the music industry's recruiting ground. Based on her Webcasts, Thom found she had one important new fan, Sony/BMG Records, which signed her to a contract.

"You spend so much time trying to get somewhere," Thom reflects, "that you never really think you're going to get there in the end, and when you do, you're like, actually, it's more like relief than anything else."

Relief — and opportunity. Thom's production already has a slicker look, and her single, "I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker," has been re-released. A new Album, "Smile, It Confuses People," is due in June.