music in films - from paramore to the unkown

[kid a]

A Grassroots Need
boethius music blog

You’re a unknown singer/songwriter on tour across the Midwest, playing to 15 people here, 150 people there, and tip-toeing through broken Budweiser bottles to sell your t-shirts and CD’s each night. You get to your motel at 2am, log-on to your Myspace Music site, and notice that one of your songs has been played over a million times, your mailbox is filling up with requests for sheet music, gig requests, signed CD’s, and hundreds of subjects titled “I LOVE YOUR SONG” from thousands of new fans.

Did the Jonas Brothers cover one of your songs on YouTube? Perez Hilton draw his trademark lip dribble on your face? Or, maybe Simon Cowell gave you a random shout out as he berated his latest dewy eyed idol.

Nope…it’s sparkling vampires, fateful love, a cultural phenomena, and a hardcore fan base that, like a firm bite on the neck, takes hold of a subject and won’t give up till they see it through to the end.

That’s the story of Hana Pestle, worldwide Twilight fans, and a piano driven, emotional ballad called “Need“. (http://www.myspace.com/hanatunes)

Ever since the pop/punk rock band Paramore revealed their successful guerrilla marketing effort to get their songs included on the first Twilight soundtrack, actors, singers, even basement Pro Tools enthusiasts have been aggressively targeting anyone and everyone associated with Twilight, Summit Entertainment, and spamming every possible email address with Stephanie Meyer in its url. The “pie in the sky” pay off? Skyrocketing CD and merchandise sales, maybe a walk down the red carpet on a Hollywood opening night, or a tour with No Doubt (see Paramore tour 2009!)

Hana Pestle’s effort seems to be less guerrilla, more word of mouth and savvy internet networking…and a moving song that fans can’t get enough of. After posting an initial one-minute video on Myspace with the idea that her song might fit with one of the main character’s emotions in the next Twilight movie, New Moon, her site garnered the attraction of the biggest Twilight website, HisGoldenEyes.Com, and the song spread like wildfire. With 1.3 million streams of the song in a month, hundreds of thousands of video plays on YouTube, and “Need” fan sites popping up each week from Australia to Brazil, Hana says she spends much of her time between gigs and songwriting these days replying to messages from Need and Twilight fans. And, according to her, “a smoky gig at the Bottleneck bar in Lincoln, Nebraska isn’t so bad when you get back to your Motel 6, log onto Myspace and see 180 messages asking, ‘HEY HANA, HOW CAN I HELP SPREAD THIS SONG?’”

But, all the fans in the world, guerrilla marketing, and inside connections can’t move a director to select your song for a particular scene, or convince a producer to add a song to a soundtrack; but, bands and artists continue to reach for the stars and hope for that “right place at the right time” moment. And in this age of Disney Channel and American Idol mega-marketing pipelines onto the TV sets and corporate radio stations across America, a natural, grassroots boost is a welcome gift.

Hana seems to be quite grounded and summed it up best when I caught up with her by phone after a February show in Columbus, Ohio: “Wow!…That’s what I think every time I open my Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter messages… “I’m so grateful that people like my song, and they want to help spread it. I know some of that connection comes from their feelings about New Moon and Bella, but I just want everyone to know that I appreciate their help, appreciate their connection to the lyrics, and hope that they stick with me and my music after the fervor of the Twilight series fades away.”

Not a bad perspective when a Google search of “Music for New Moon Twilight” yields thousands of star-reaching acoustic souls, hoping to catch a piece of glitter from a sparkling vampire.

http://boethiusmusic.wordpress.com/

***copied with permission****

[mackerel]

1. Great sound. Myspace has been a great way for artist to get

exposure and develop a fan base.