By APA Staff

After her record label delayed her album, Marie Digby turned to the internet to prove she could draw a loyal fan base. With a little boost from "Umbrella," her album Unfold is being released on April 8.

Interview with Marie Digby
March 18, 2008
Interview and Article by Margaretta Soehendro
Video edit by Oliver Chien

If you have ever heard a cover of Rihanna's "Umbrella," chances are you listened to 24-year-old Marié Digby's interpretation of the "it" song of summer 2007.

Digby, a singer-songwriter living in Los Angeles, posted a YouTube video of her acoustic version of the song on May 31, 2007, and the artist, the performance, the arrangement and the timing aligned for a success beyond the domain of the world wide web.

Between fans of Rihanna's "Umbrella" stumbling upon Digby's video in their search results and a YouTube employee featuring her clip on the website's home page, a whole new audience discovered Digby.

It was all in a day's work, literally. Digby said she heard the song in the morning, learned it that day, spent 15 minutes arranging her acoustic version of it and then recorded the video. She said she worked on it so quickly that she didn't realize she was mistakenly pronouncing umbrella the normal way versus Rihanna's way: um-buh-rella. YouTube users pointed it out to her, however.

Her label, Hollywood Records, who she signed with in 2002, noticed the buzz she was generating and asked her to go into the studio to record her version of the song. She was, however, given no budget to pay for the professional recording, but a friend offered to help for free, and with some other friends, it only took them one take.

"It blows my mind that something that cheap and that quick, you know, made it to radio," she said.

But Digby wasn't in the country when local L.A. radio station, 98.7 FM, played her song on the air. She was vacationing with her family in Asia as part of their biannual trip to Japan. Digby's mother is Japanese; her father is Irish American. They met on a train in Japan near the end of her father's time studying abroad, she said, staying in touch as "pen pals" for years.

After being incommunicado without convenient Internet access while in Cambodia and Thailand, Digby came back to Tokyo to discover from friends that she was on the radio.

"My family and I were jumping all over the beds and causing a ruckus, and it was great. It was amazing," she said.

She's garnered considerable attention since YouTube and "Umbrella" propelled her to greater consciousness among members of the media and entertainment industry. MTV reality soap The Hills has used five of her songs for the show. The New York Times style section profiled Digby's fashion taste for "unabashedly girly" clothes.

But along with good press is bad press. The Wall Street Journal used Digby as the centerpiece of a story about how mainstream businesses use alternative media to create a fan base and grassroots legitimacy. The Journal insinuated Digby was not a genuine YouTube phenom because Hollywood Records, a Disney subsidiary, had planned to use "astroturfing" for her career trajectory. The Journal cited the absence of Digby's record deal from her MySpace page as reason for suspicion, but Digby defended herself on MySpace last year and said her Hollywood Records contract was never a hidden fact since it was an easy Google search.

YouTube isn't the only thing a struggling musician can learn from Digby: a record label, it turns out, is not the end game. Digby's decision to go on YouTube in April 2007 was not an orchestrated plan by Hollywood Records' marketing department, she said, but rather, a need to show her label that there was a fan base willing to buy her album, which was already completed.

Photo credit: David C. Lee

With American Idol and the Internet turning young unknowns into overnight sensations, the general public rarely hears about the struggles that continue for unknown artists. Before YouTube and Hollywood Records, Digby was a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley who decided to drop out to pursue her dream of being a musician. Having studied piano since she was three years old and written songs as a teen, she wanted to be a performer. And while she admitted her parents weren't thrilled with her decision, she said they also understood she was serious in her pursuit and work ethic.

Digby put herself through her version of music business "boot camp," going to any open mic in Los Angeles and then moving on to open shows.

"You have to pay those dues, especially as a singer-songwriter. If you're just a pop artist and you're just singer, it's kind of a different thing. But if you're a performer, I feel like you have to go through that in order to grow," she said.

Other than more people knowing about her and finally having the backing of her label, Digby said her life hasn't changed much at all. She won't be a stranger to YouTube, even though she's proven she has a sizable fan base to Hollywood Records.

"What worked for me was to put up the videos on YouTube and to create an environment where I can be really personal with all my fans, and I feel like that's something I need to uphold and keep doing for the rest of my career," she said.

Published: Friday, April 4, 2008