Sarah Sarah Sarah, where do we start with this....?
Let's jump in a little time capsule back to 2007/2008. The dance music industry was going through seismic change as digital formats came to the fore and vinyl single sales (the dance industry's staple) fell off a cliff. Coupled with illegal downloading, all of a sudden, the money had dried up for labels and they urgently needed to monetise.
At the same time, club culture was pivoting from weekly/monthly nights to festivals - and this combined with low (zero) cost of releasing huge volumes of music from new artists presented the opportunity to claw back the lost record sales money.
Every week saw a new specialist download store open - including mixmag's own. Mixmag itself was owned at the time by Development Hell, who were part of The Guardian.
Low cost of production (by this point you didn't need a studio to be a producer, it was easy to do it all on a laptop, so Sarah's "I made the track in the bedroom" is far from exceptional - it was standard) meant that labels no longer had to carry risk in releasing music - no pressing vinyl, label artwork etc. Advances became a thing of the past, and festival organisers cottoned on to the idea of record labels and magazines like mixmag hosting arenas.
The labels therefore signed anyone and everyone, knowing a couple would make it (bear in mind the labels were typically offshoots of big labels like Sony, Polydor etc etc but kept "indy" for credibility) but the rest would be the unpaid support acts in these festival arenas to fill a lineup. Sarah Akwisombe even refers to a festival gig of 4 drunk Scottish men. Case in point. She was a filler act. Some in the industry cruelly called it "the sausage factory" -
tit meat went in, a couple of bangers came out.
Why the mixmag cover? It was STANDARD that if a record label (in this instance XL Recordings / Locked On) took out a load of ads, they'd be rewarded with a cover slot for the artists in question - which in turn grew interest in the acts to drive MP3 sales in the magazine's own download store.....
Sarah / Goldielocks was just there at this moment in time, when strange deals were being done as an industry tried to adapt to a new digital world. She never got further, she wasn't on the cover out of editorial interest, she was a backfill artist from the label to bulk out the cover shot and have another girl there with Little Boots, as part of a standard commercial deal.
Sorry - a long post with a lot of incidental but important info there!
In short - she was on the cover because it was paid for. Not talent or anything else.
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