The online revolution

• Lily Allen is an English recording artist who built up a fan base and gained recognition for her music through the social networking site MySpace. After leaving school to concentrate on musical composition and performance. She created a number of demo songs, and towards the end of 2005, set up a profile on MySpace, where she made some of her recordings public.
• Allen signed a record deal with Regal Recordings as her popularity grew, with tens of thousands of views on her MySpace page.
• The demos posted on her page attracted thousands of listeners, and her saleability was proved by the fact 500 limited edition vinyl singles of "LDN" were released and were being re-sold for as much as £40. Allen also produced two mixtapes in order to promote her work.
• As her number of MySpace friends and views continued to escalate, music magazine "The Observer Music Monthly" took interest in her and published an article about her and her success through MySpace in March 2006. Two months later, Allen recieved her first real mainstream coverage after featuring in the magazine's cover story.
• Due to having already created her own rebellious teen image, built up a fan base and produced her own sound in her music, she was allowed much more creative control when producing her album, rather than being forced into working with mainstream producers who may have disregarded her already established "niche" and tried to change her.
• These days it is becoming more and more common for artists to be signed by record labels once they have already produced their own album and created a brand for themselves, as this makes less work for the record label.
• Similar to Lily Allen, Jose Vanders has set up a MySpace page on which she broadcasts the music she has produced in order to build up her fan base, which would make her a more appealing artist to a record label.
• Lily Allen's songs were downloaded from MySpace 19 million times and as of 9th February 2009, she had 448,000 MySpace friends.
• As well as just broadcasting her music, Allen would blog about her life and the controversies surrounding her. This gave her fans something extra than just her music, making her page even more interesting.
• Lily Allen went on to have huge success, winning many awards and achieving great record sales.
• By January 2009 her debut album "Alright, still" had sold 960,000 copies in the United Kingdom and 520,000 copies in the United States.
• Her second album "It's Not Me, It's You" debuted at number 1 in the UK Albums Chart.
• Lily Allen has proved how much of an impact the online revolution has had on the music industry, with artists no longer needing record labels from day one in order to become successful. It shows how strong online promotion can be, suggesting traditional methods are a waste of money due to sites such as MySpace being free to broadcast on.
• As proved here, the online revolution has also allowed artists to build a fan base, an image and their own sound before even reaching the stage of obtaining a record deal. By proving their popularity to the label, in cases like this it often allows the artist much more creative control over their music, rather than being moulded by the record label.