A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

COMM 150: Irish singer-songwriter Cara Dillon's adventures with major and indie labels

You don't have to be into Irish music to appreciate Cara Dillon's career (altho' it probably helps)! Or the way she uses the Internet to market her music downloads and CDs to a niche market scattered worldwide. And you don't have to be Irish to consider her an example of the trends you're researching for our first documented essay ... if you get my drift. I was tracking down one of the songs she sings, Googled into her website and was really struck by what Dillon's official biography says about her dealings with Warner Music Group(one of the majors, as I'm sure you remember from Vivian's gripping narrative on sound recordings) and the indie labels she's recorded with since she left Warner 10 years ago.

Dillon and husband Sam Lakeman, who backs her on acoustic guitar and produces her records, have this to say about the time they spent with Warner during the 1990s:
... although they look back on that period as an essential step towards affirming their strong musical tastes and developing their songwriting craft, it was full of frustration and the constant pressure from the label to have commercial success. ... But by 2000 they had parted company with Warners without releasing a single track and in stark contrast to their recent recordings with the label began working on an album of mostly traditional material which they quietly released on an unsuspecting audience via Rough Trade Records.
Their contract with Rough Trade, an indie label, lasted until 2008 and gave them more creative control. During those years Dillon's career took off. She has won awards including the Irish Meteor Award for Best Female Singer, and her concert tours have taken her to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, South Korea and Singapore.

None of which would matter to you guys, except for this: I got that information off of Cara Dillon's website. I wouldn't know about her if I hadn't seen her performances on YouTube, which I found when I was doing keyword searches for a couple of songs I wanted to learn. You can learn something about international niche marketing by surfing around her website and her MySpace page (click on "Store" and see what's there, for example, altho' you don't have to buy anything)! See if you think the Internet has changed the way [Cara Dillon and her husband] reach their audiences in an era of 24/7 communication and niche marketing? Ask yourself: How does the "long tail” fit into the picture? Where would Dillon's blend of Irish traditional music and acoustic guitar fit on the cute little long tail frequency distribution graph with the dinosaur that we looked at in class? Up toward the head? Out on the tail? How far out? Do you get my drift?

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About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.