How Did That happen?

Posted: February 24th, 2009 | Author: CazzyDog | Filed under: Label Life | No Comments »

I wasn’t preoccupied with India, on the contrary, my sister Nikki was handling all day to day for India and worked her ass off, and without her, it would never had happened. I would do the strategy and the heavy lifting, but Nikki did it all.

The next call was on one of those rare days when Kedar and I put aside our differences enough to actually speak to each other. His ominous prophecy was, “Watch, she is going to turn on all of us after this happens.” I didn’t believe it at the time, and in many ways he was right, unfortunately.

We did the video for “Video” that sounds funny; it was a cute little thing and worked well for perpetuating her image. I think MTV added it early, in fact, I know they added it early when I got a call from them saying, “You’re not getting enough radio to justify us keeping this in high rotation.”

That was true, but I begged them to stay on it until we hit “street date” and if the sales sucked they could run away without any hard feelings. I argued my case that though radio wasn’t exactly exploding, I could feel something big about to happen, and just stay with us until street. They were kind enough to do so.

BET was already there and being highly supportive and we were starting to get a little love from VH1 as well.

I could feel the heat, but I truly think there were two people who knew we had something about to explode; me and Kedar. No doubt our respective teams were believers and many, many industry mediums were as well and God bless them all for taking a chance, but me and Kedar, the two guys who fought each other every single day, agreed on one thing: this was about to explode.

With street date looming, we all poured it on, connecting every dot we could find, and going at it guerilla style, as we had virtually no budget, at least not by current industry standards.

This was truly the little engine that could and we were working around the clock knowing a bad showing on first week sales would kill our inertia immediately.

That’s a real fucked up thing about this business that has changed since the advent of Soundscan, first week sales. Before that, a record was allowed to grow, find its market and progress. Now it’s like Hollywood, bad opening weekend and you are dead in the water. A real cause for problems yet no one really gets it.

We were sweating out week one even though we saw great orders coming in. Of course we knew those orders could easily convert into the dreaded “returns”, records shipped back when they gather dust on retail shelves.

We believed in her and we believed we had enough intangibles happening that would all converge, not in the standard fashion, but nothing was standard about this project.

We had a fraction of the radio, TV and press that most explosive records had. We had a miniscule budget, but we knew something was connecting, you could feel it. First day sales were impressive and we watched and cultivated all data like you count contractions before childbirth.

Again, Kedar and I were screaming that this was going to pop and pop big. I’m pretty sure our teams thought we were nuts, but then street date comes and out of almost nowhere, a girl with an acoustic guitar, a God given voice, and a small team of crazed believers, explodes onto the Billboard sales charts with over seventy six thousand units sold, entering at nine with a bullet in the top ten and causing the first of many, “Who the fuck is India.Arie and how did that happen?” ponders to be blasted across the industry.

We went nuts and most people shook their heads. We were off and running big time.

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