Sandi Thom

Sandi Thom, a neo-folk-rock singer and songwriter, first drew widespread notice and debate by securing a major-label contract after staging a three-week series of live web broadcasts from the basement of her flat. Born Alexandria Thom on August 11, 1981, in Banff, Scotland, she performed through her teenage years with the cover band the Residents, a group distinct from the avant-rock outfit famous for eyeball masks, before enrolling at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen. While studying at the Liverpool Institute of the Performing Arts, the institution nicknamed the "Fame Academy" that Paul McCartney established, Thom sang with the gospel choir Love and Joy. Upon finishing her coursework in 2003 she moved back to Scotland and worked as a session vocalist on commercial jingles.

A show in Glasgow caught the ear of the upstart indie label Viking Legacy, which put out her debut single, "I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair)," in October 2005. The track received BBC Radio 2 airplay, yet she remained largely unknown and sustained a demanding tour schedule that included opening dates for the Proclaimers across a short U.K. run. Legend holds that a breakdown on the return trip from a South Wales gig prompted her to step away from the road temporarily and instead promote her music through an unconventional route: she bought a £60 webcam and arranged twenty-one consecutive live performances streamed from her Tooting flat on www.sandithom.com.

The series 21 Nights from Tooting began on February 24, 2006, under the technical guidance of Streaming Tank. It opened to an audience of just seventy viewers, but the next night the count rose to six hundred seventy and by the middle of the second week reached one hundred sixty-two thousand, with participants tuning in from the U.S., Russia, and the Middle East. The resulting media storm brought major-label executives literally to her door, and in April she signed with RCA, a Sony subsidiary, streaming the contract signing itself. Questions soon surfaced about the grassroots nature of her breakthrough, given that she already had a manager, a PR firm, and Viking Legacy behind her beforehand. It later emerged that Streaming Tank's executives were personal acquaintances of her manager, Ian Brown, and had shouldered the full production costs. Some observers even alleged that Sony had engineered the entire event, a claim the label rejected.

RCA reissued "I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker" in May, and on June 4, 2006, the single ascended to number one on the U.K. pop chart, displacing Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," the first track to achieve that position solely through Internet downloads. Her debut album, Smile...It Confuses People, reached stores the following day and quickly claimed the top spot on the British albums chart. In 2008 she released her second album, The Pink and the Lily.