Leslie Feist, a former punk rocker from Calgary, Alberta, now known professionally as the indie torch singer Feist, recorded her 2004 album, Let It Die, in Paris. But if listeners detect any hint of French flavoring, she insisted, it is entirely imaginary.
"If I'd said, 'Oh, I made my record in Istanbul,' then everyone would be like, 'We can hear the sweetened mint tea in small glass cups,"' she said. "Like, 'We can just feel the hookah smoke running through the veins of the songs.' People need a context to understand things through. In reality, I had no intention to stay in France. I was going to take this and go tour where it made sense."
So it came as little surprise that Feist - whose cosmopolitan touch and offbeat voice are on display on her newest album, The Reminder, which earned her a Grammy nomination Thursday - drew the attention of Martin Kierszenbaum. Kierszenbaum, who is president of international operations for the record industry heavyweight Interscope Records, signed Feist as the first artist to his own minilabel, Cherrytree Records.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS
LOCAL REPERTORY
Though Kierszenbaum devotes much of his energies to devising global marketing plans for big Interscope acts like Nelly Furtado and 50 Cent, with Cherrytree he has been quietly flirting with the boundaries, artistic and geographic, of mainstream pop by scouting performers from around the world and trying to establish them as stars far removed from their native countries.
In addition to Feist, for whose work Cherrytree secured the domestic rights, Kierszenbaum, 40, is betting on acts, including the Pipettes, a Ronettes-inspired British girl group that is percolating in Japan; and Flipsyde, a Latin-tinged rap collective from Oakland, California, with a hit in Germany. Next stop: Robyn, a Swedish pop singer who is making her return to the US.
Kierszenbaum said such acts reflected his bent toward musicians who are "inside the pop tradition, but push the envelope."
But he acknowledged that his choices also reflected a dramatic shift in global sales patterns. Though corporate-owned record labels continue to rely heavily on exports of English-speaking stars, mainly from the US, the top sellers in many countries increasingly are albums released by homegrown acts.
Sales began shifting more than a decade ago. In 2000 roughly 68 percent of worldwide sales derived from so-called local repertory - artists working in their native country - up from 58 percent in 1991, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group in London. Though US stars like Beyonce and the Red Hot Chili Peppers still connect with fans in territories around the world, the ranks and global appeal of major US acts appear to be waning, many music executives say. In Spain, for instance, only one American album - the soundtrack to High School Musical 2 - is in the most recent Top 10 chart.
The surge by foreign talent has arisen partly from the spread of state-of-the-art recording equipment and software, as well as the expansion of previously limited avenues for promotion. MTV, for example, has started more than 50 music-video channels customized for viewers in Europe, Asia and other regions. The decline of an American presence among acts abroad also stems from old-fashioned cultural differences: Genres that fed a domestic boom in the 1990s, including country music and certain strains of rap, do not sell as well overseas.
"There's more of a nationalistic trend generally in all these countries - not just in music, but I think politically," said Richard Griffiths, a former senior record-label executive who now runs the UK talent management firm Modest Management. And repeated layoffs at the labels' affiliates have weakened their ability to push acts imported from the US. "It used to be they'd be breaking those huge artists in America, and then the word would go out, 'You will break these around the world,' and generally speaking, they did," he said. "Mariah, Celine, Michael Jackson. Those days are obviously gone."
ON THE FLIP SIDE
Kierszenbaum, though, is counting on what he sees as the flip side to the trend: Emerging talent that appeals to fans in one international market can be marketed in another territory, and, potentially, the US. "I just think that human beings aren't that different when it comes to pop music," he said. "I really believe that if something can resonate somewhere, it's got a good chance of resonating elsewhere. You may have to tweak it, adapt it, change the approach, but it can work."
The US-born son of two Argentine scientists, Kierszenbaum played in a band and a bilingual rap act, Maroon, in college, but broke into the music business 19 years ago as a clerk in the mailroom of PolyGram Music Group.
He was later hired as a publicist in the international division of A&M Records, where he worked with acts like Soundgarden and Sting, and eventually ran the department. But in 1999 layoffs swept the label after PolyGram, its parent company, was sold to the liquor giant Seagram and merged into that conglomerate's Universal Music Group.
A handful of artists and employees, among them Kierszenbaum, were folded into Universal's Interscope unit, which despite a roster of cutting-edge acts like Nine Inch Nails and Snoop Dogg, suffered from a lackluster international presence. So Kierszenbaum helped devise marketing strategies to export the label's acts.
But Interscope's chairman, Jimmy Iovine, also decided to test Kierszenbaum's ear for new prospects and encouraged him to sign talent himself. One of his first discoveries - signed in a partnership with Universal's Russian affiliate - was the Russian teenage girl duo t.A.T.u.
Kierszenbaum encouraged Universal's arm in Japan to enlist a native performer to record a cover version of t.A.T.u.'s All the Things She Said in Japanese. That version was offered as a selection in karaoke bars - a crucial outlet for music discovery in Asia - as t.A.T.u.'s album, 200Km/H in the Wrong Lane, was hitting record shops. The album became an international hit, selling roughly 1.7 million copies in Japan alone, he said.
Such successes prompted Iovine to agree in early 2005 to give Kierszenbaum his own imprint. "He's eclectic," Iovine said of Kierszenbaum's discoveries for his label, "but most of the stuff is capable of hitting mass appeal. He's very driven. Signing a Russian band and teaching them English? He's picking up that lane." So far, Feist has been Cherrytree's biggest hit. The Reminder, her second album for the label, received an extra boost when a song was tapped for an iPod commercial, and has sold more than 370,000 copies domestically, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.
BIG IN JAPAN
But not everything has translated. For instance, the Lovemakers, a raunchy electro-rock act from Oakland, did not attract much of an audience outside the Bay Area. The Fratellis, a Scottish rock band that released its debut album in the US earlier this year, attracted some critical acclaim and exposure in an Apple advertisement, but topped out at a modest 129,000 copies.
In other cases, however, Kierszenbaum's cross-continental viewpoint is showing signs of promise. There is strong buzz around Robyn, the Swedish singer who - after a short-lived pop hit in the US a decade ago - is returning with a genre-bending album that has already topped the charts in her native country. Potential avenues for re-introducing her to US fans, Kierszenbaum said, might include featuring her as a guest vocalist on a hip-hop artist's single.
And in Japan, the high-concept imagery of the Pipettes, who sport polka-dot outfits and retro, candy-coated melodies, has fueled brisk sales for their album, which was released there two months ago. The trio and one of its songs, Because It's Not Love, are featured in a new music video, paid for by Panasonic, that doubles as a commercial.
Though the Pipettes are also trying to win fans in the US, Kierszenbaum said he thought the trio had a better shot at connecting in Asia early on. The label has advanced money for three Pipettes tours in Japan on the theory that breaking there should come "first and easiest."
"Nothing's easy," he added, "but it's easier than trying to break the Pipettes in Iowa at the beginning. We've got to start a fire somewhere."
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