On Laurie Berkner...

Okay, so there's this post about Laurie Berkner. And there's this other post, too.

What I think is this:

1. Laurie Berkner is indeed really good at what she does, while of course respecting Amy's differing views. I think kids' music is different than some genres in that you really don't get a particular type of success without having some chops, and chops she has. There's no payola, even the well-marketed artists are not all that massively exposed, and parents just aren't going to keep buying things their kids don't like. Plus, kids don't know yet that they're supposed to like what they're told to like. Maybe you get the first CD to be a moderate success through smoke and mirrors, but not the next one, and the one after that, and the DVD...her ongoing success is because people genuinely dig her. She's not the first artist I play, but she was the first artist we ever played on the show (due to hitting play on the wrong CD player -- she was supposed to be the second artist.)

2. I don't think Laurie Berkner is so much better than other similar-targeted artists in proportion to her success. Boy, that's a bad sentence. Let's try that again: I don't think she's enough better than other artists to explain her ginormous success. So it's gotta be something else.

3. One thing it is: She's crazy nice and seems to have surrounded herself with crazy nice people. Last year around this time I asked a bunch of artists for donations for Liam's preschool auction (and will be asking again soon!). Many many artists donated a CD or two, and that was awesome. She gave, if memory serves, one of every one of her CDs, autographed, plus a DVD. By any rational measure, she doesn't "need" the publicity of a Montessori school in western Massachusetts, or the good feelings of a DJ on a 100-watt radio station out here. But she is, as noted, crazy nice. (See Frances England's post on Amy's blog for more on this.)

4. Another thing it is: Probably some luck. And I don't mean to demean her talent or the talent of her PR person (who posts in Amy's comments, by the way). But sometimes there's right-time-right-place, and that was it for her. It was going to be someone, and she happened to be the person who was there -- a talented and qualified person who was there. A year later, and maybe we'd be having this conversation about someone else -- someone none of us have heard of because the CD never got to the surface.

5. As for indie versus not, I disagree with Stefan that the discussion is "tired," but I agree that indieness itself doesn't predict artistic credibility. See this post for why it matters to me. Regardless, Laurie is indie by most measures.