Spicemania: a multimedia marketing trick

An old marketing trick revamped for the multimedia age

From bubblegum pop's flavor-of-the-month to the year's hottest entertainment commodity, the ubiquitous Spice Girls have made a quantum leap in a little less than a year.

But the girls are only the tip of a trend that has seen novelty acts -- formerly short-lived oddities in popular music -- become the most commercially profitable enterprises around.

America's Backstreet Boys and the oddball Danish quartet Aqua have joined the British bubblegum-pop queens in a category of musicians that rely as much on merchandising and gimmicky presentation as they do music.

It's not a new phenomenon.

They've all been compared to groups like the early 70s candy-rockers the Bay City Rollers and teen idol Shaun Cassidy, who were aggressively promoted to an exclusively teen audience. If you dig back further in time, other acts were being sold to specific target audiences as well, not surprisingly coinciding with the rise of television as a medium.

"The prototype of these type of acts are actually people like Frankie Avalon and Connie Stevens in the '60s, where there was a TV connection as well," says Larry LeBlanc, Canadian correspondent for Billboard magazine.

"Don't forget their appeal has largely been garnered by television -- all these acts. They're all video-friendly acts and they're good-looking kids, all of them."

Video has changed the way music is absorbed by audiences, says David Kines, director of music operations for MuchMusic. Broadcasts of specials featuring the Spice Girls -- Live in Istanbul and a MuchMusic-produced profile -- are the highest-rated shows the music network has ever aired.

While earlier acts that have generated massive popularity, like the Beatles, were signed for their music and later mined for their sex appeal and personality, today's supergroups are hand picked with those qualities in mind.

"I think the avenues for record companies to exploit it are much bigger," says Kines.

"Before, the Bay City Rollers appeared on the Midnight Special and that was it.

"Now they can go on Leno, Letterman, the Billboard awards, the MTV awards, the Grammies, the American Music Awards. There's a lot more areas to exploit just in terms of getting exposure."

That's the reason we're inundated with Spice Girl spin-offs and paraphernalia, LeBlanc says. Record companies, who have become part of multinational conglomerates with holdings in film and television, have realized that their artists must fight it out with all the other multimedia stuff out there.

"The thing that has happened in the last two or three years is that record company people have woken up and said 'Wait a minute, we have not been servicing the eight- to 12-year-old marketplace,'" says LeBlanc.

"What you're talking about really is an awakening of essentially an audience that was disenfranchised about 10 years ago as all the companies ran off and tried to sign grunge bands."

Which is why a serious battle for the movie box office is being fought out between Titanic and Spice World, something that would never have happened between the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night and 1964's blockbuster My Fair Lady.

"Music today has got competition from so many other fields, whereas in the '60s and '70s there was nothing -- there was music that was it," said LeBlanc. "That was what defines you as a teenager."

The competition has also increased the speed at which groups can scale the ladder of fame, says Kines.

Last fall, MuchMusic's programmers agonized somewhat over how much attention to give the Spice Girls, who had yet to prove they were more than a flash in the pan.

Now, they have two multimillion selling albums, a film, a 200-item merchandise catalogue, half a dozen slickly crafted videos and as Kines points out, enough momentum for the music station to confidently give them a substantial amount of air time.

"Is it going to stop? No, and there's not much you can do about it. The visual aspect of it is so integrated with the success of a group now."