There’s another Scandinavian poppet being shipped to the UK later this year….
…..this time it’s the turn of Anna Abreu to come to these shores in the hope of making a large population of record buying public fall in love with her, or at least her song. We’ve written about Anna quite a lot on here before. Most recently, her new single in Finland ‘Music Everywhere’ has been making us very happy indeed. It’s the first song from her third album, ‘Just A Pretty Face?’ which we were delighted to learn would be a full on club record! We first wrote about Anna late last year when ‘Vinegar’, the lead single from her sophomore album ‘Now’ was made available. We fell in love with ‘Vinegar’ straight away – it’s a September esque pop track that pays a definite homage to ‘Fever’ era Kylie.
And it’s ‘Vinegar’ which has been chosen as the first single in the UK! It’s been given a fresh new remix though, courtesy of the Buzz Junkies, which we actually even prefer to the original. It’s gotten rid of the ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’-esque beats which some would have seen as being dated, and replaced them with a piano house riff! It’s got a lot more energy to it now and sounds like a dance track in its own right rather than a token dance remix of a pop song. We played it at last night’s BWO scandipop live gig, and it sounded even better on club speakers. It’s also been given a new video treatment, which goes to The Box television station on Friday of this week. We’ll upload it here when it goes online. And the single itself is released on November 9th.
The record label behind this is Upside Records, who are in a partnership with Sony. We’re particularly excited about Upside Records and their potential because we absolutely love their business model. It’s not a new model by any means, but it’s one which has been forgotten about by many other labels recently and is criminally under used. Basically, a major label operates a different company within country to country and territory to territory. So even if the label of one territory had a multi platinum hit with a local act, the same label within another territory often (but not always) might not release that act, because the act doesn’t have a presence in the second territory. Plus they have all of their own acts to concentrate on too, as well as the core international acts of that label. This leads to lots of pop gems that are confined to their own country, and underused, when they could potentially have had much bigger success in other parts of the world. In the case of Sony UK, Upside has been set up to scout for these potential hits from other Sony territories, and release them in the UK in the hope of scoring a hit from it there too. It’s a simple practice which benefits the artist, music fans, and the label. The artist gets a rare shot at attempting to break a larger territory, fans of a type of music which is big abroad, but not in their own country, get to have more of this music introduced to them, and the record label gets another revenue stream (which was always available to it but just sitting there) open to it and at absolute minimal cost. Win, win, and win! And in these times of drastically falling record sales, one win, let alone three, is always welcome! Plus if Upside have the good taste to see something great in Anna Abreu, then we’re looking forward to seeing what else they come up with over the near future.
Here’s the original video. We’ll upload the new one when it’s available.
