New Music: Introducing - Elle Watson

Right now marketing new pop music is a complicated old business. But if you look in the Rules of Pop 2016, (Hardcover) edition Chapter 8, section 2.3, you’ll see that not putting out your biggest song first is still one of the best ways to go. You need to get the ‘tastemakers’ with their latest iphones, Nutribullets and beautiful clothes on board. For these people their whole raison d'être is to be 'on it' earlier than everyone else, so that they can claim to be influential and bang up their Klout scores. The tastemakers can help the new artist by giving them credibility and that way the artist can build popularity gradually without early mainstream over exposure. Even better, if you're the 'tastemaker' that premieres the song on line then you can claim bigger bragging rights than all the other tastemakers in the war of the cool.

So what you do is let the tastemakers secretly hear a number of songs by the new artist, so that they are convinced that there is something worth backing. Then when the artist puts out the first song and it’s kind of OK, but not exactly going to set the world on fire, the tastemakers can all pretend they can hear potential and justify jumping on the track, because in reality they’ve already heard the better songs that are coming.

So here’s a new artist, with her first song. Her name is Elle Watson and the track is called Body. The blurb with the email that came accompanying the tune tells us that it was written in Stockholm and influenced by the novel You by Caroline Kepnes, with Elle singing from the perspective of being stalked and confined, only to fall in love with the captor. 

It’s actually a half decent song (honestly); it's a bit of a grower, taking a couple of listens to really sink in. Basically it's sort of thing that tastemakers might love. I can see some potential with this artist….

Elle Watson - Body