When Mariah Carey recently won two Grammy Awards, it was a fairy-tale ending for a pop-music Cinderella. The 21-year-old New Yorker was a complete unknown just a year ago. But bolstered by her Grammys — for best new artist and best female pop performance — her debut album has held the No. 1 spot on the pop charts for the last seven weeks. Mariah Carey has sold more than four million copies in the United States (seven million worldwide, according to Columbia Records) and produced three No. 1 singles — “Vision of Love,” “Love Takes Time” and “Someday.”
Ms. Carey's storybook rise began at a party in 1988 when she met Thomas Mottola, president of Columbia's parent company, Sony Music Entertainment, and gave him her demo tape. Although such a gambit rarely works, the story, which has already passed into record-industry legend, concludes with Mr. Mottola popping the demo into the tape deck of his limousine on a whim and being so impressed he rushed back to the party to court Ms. Carey for the label.
Despite its romantic inception, Ms. Carey's seeming overnight success has been anything but simple fortune. Once convinced of the singer's potential, Sony (formerly CBS Records) threw its full production and promotion weight behind her. Within the industry, her marketing campaign has been rumored to be one of the most expensive for a new artist. Columbia will not say how much the label has spent or discuss specifics, but making her a star clearly became important to Sony's top record executives.
Ultimately, Ms. Carey's success says as much about the talents of a record company as those of the singer. It also shows how record companies are increasingly willing to bet heavily on one artist in hopes of realizing a big payoff. In the industry, such performers are referred to as priority artists, a term record companies abhor, since it suggests that not all artists are treated equally. But the problem is often one of numbers: radio stations can add just a few new singles each week, and labels must decide which records to push.
Ms. Carey, an attractive and able pop singer with a five-octave range, was the ideal candidate to fill a hole in the company's artist roster. Although Sony has enjoyed some success in the last two years with female pop singers like Martika, Basia and Gloria Estefan, the company has lacked a big-selling pop diva on the order of Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Madonna or Paula Abdul.
For their would-be star, Sony's top executives took an unusually active role. Mr. Mottola and Don Ienner, president of Columbia Records, personally selected the producers. Mr. Ienner, who had only recently joined Columbia after heading the promotion department at Arista Records, suggested Narada Michael Walden and Ric Wake. Each had crafted hit records for Arista's two biggest-selling female pop singers, Whitney Houston and Taylor Dayne, respectively.
“Tommy told me, ‘She's incredible; you just won't believe how good she is,’ ” Mr. Wake recalls. “As far as he was concerned, it was the Second Coming.”
Mr. Mottola, the album's executive producer, declines to discuss his involvement in the making and marketing of Mariah Carey, calling such information proprietary. “To give away our trade secrets would not be to my advantage” is all he will say. Mr. Mottola has also denied published reports linking him romantically to the singer.
But he does say: “When I heard and saw Mariah, there was absolutely no doubt she was in every way destined for stardom.”
Indeed, Columbia took meticulous care in fashioning a record capable of garnering maximum radio exposure. “There was so much momentum, and everyone was pushing so hard from every level,” says Mr. Wake. “There were so many decisions being made.”
Those decisions were largely concerned with how to present the singer in a commercially viable musical setting. Although Ms. Carey, whose mother was an opera singer and vocal coach, cites the rhythm-and-blues singer Gladys Knight and the gospel artists Shirley Caesar and the Clark Sisters as primary influences, Mariah Carey bears the unmistakable stylistic stamp of Ms. Houston, one of the biggest selling pop singers of the last decade. In fact, Ms. Houston's own career may be feeling the squeeze of Ms. Carey's success: the last Houston album, I'm Your Baby Tonight, is selling at a slower pace than its two predecessors.
Ms. Carey and the composer Ben Margulies, with whom she had been writing songs since the age of 18, came up with the bulk of material for the album. Released in June to generally favorable reviews, the record developed into a savvy but conservative collection of light dance tunes and torchy ballads.
But even before the album was completed, the CBS marketing department began giving Ms. Carey the same attention she was receiving in the studio. Months in advance, they began laying the groundwork for a long run on the pop charts. “We had numerous, numerous meetings about Mariah way in advance of the album's release,” says Jane Berk, the former director of marketing for CBS Records. The strategy was to create a pre-release buzz among record stores and radio stations. “It was about carefully planting seeds in the industry and nurturing their development at every stage,” Ms. Berk says. “It was very strategically planned. We went out on a limb, and it was worth taking the risk.”
Columbia's program for Ms. Carey was similar to one undertaken just a few months earlier by SBK Records on behalf of the vocal trio Wilson Phillips. Like Ms. Carey, that group has also sold four million copies of its first album and had several hit singles. Charles Koppelman, the chairman of SBK, says such intensive campaigns can be costly but effective in establishing credibility.
“We needed to convince everybody that this is real music,” Mr. Koppelman says of Wilson Phillips, adding that there are advantages to focusing promotional efforts on one artist. “Using concentration rather than a scatter-gun approach, you can really sell major numbers that justify almost whatever you spend.”
For Ms. Carey, the first step was to perform at the National Association of Recording Merchandisers convention in Los Angeles last spring to introduce her to executives from the country's biggest record-store chains. If Ms. Carey had been unable to impress that crowd, her chances for a hit would have been seriously hindered.
Howard Appelbaum, vice president and head buyer of the 33-store Kemp Mill record chain in Maryland, recalls Ms. Carey's performance as “good, not incredible.” But he says that Columbia — which had primed the audience with a video presentation on Ms. Carey — was still able to whip up tremendous excitement. “The energy level in that room was astounding,” Mr. Appelbaum says of Columbia's buildup.
Mr. Appelbaum became more convinced of her potential a few weeks later when Ms. Carey performed for retailers and radio personnel in Philadelphia. The show was part of an unusual promotional swing — a nine-city tour Columbia organized for Ms. Carey while soliciting orders for her album.
“Most labels send out tapes to sales people and hope they listen,” Ms. Berk says. “We wanted to make sure people listened to Mariah — so we sent her.”
It worked. After hearing Ms. Carey perform a brief set, Mr. Appelbaum, for one, increased his chain's order for the album.
The promotional tour also paid dividends with radio stations. Keith Naftaly, program director at KMEL in San Francisco, boasts that his station was the first to play Ms. Carey's debut single, “Vision of Love,” after hearing her perform. Mr. Naftaly, who has a reputation for picking hits, is the kind of program director whose play list is closely watched by other stations. KMEL's decision to play the record, and its subsequent success with the station's listeners, helped establish Ms. Carey's commercial legitimacy.
Once Mariah Carey was a hit, the label continued its financial push. The album has been featured in almost all the label's consumer advertisements; Columbia has also maintained a high profile for Mariah Carey in the industry, with up to five full-page ads in Billboard since the record's release. Store displays — an expensive and effective way to reach consumers — has also played an extensive part in Ms. Carey's campaign. (Some stores receive thousands of dollars in merchandise in exchange for window and floor displays.)
Through packaging and videos, Ms. Carey has also been able to solidify her reputation as a vocal talent, despite the fact that she has never toured.
“The visual element was a very, very, very important part of exposing this artist,” says Ms. Berk. Pictures of Ms. Carey crooning into an old-fashioned microphone were widely used in her promotion, on the back cover of her album and in her first video, for “Vision of Love.” (A spokesman denies published reports that the video clip cost as much as $450,000.)
“What we were selling was unmistakably about an artist who was a singer,” Ms. Berk adds. Ms. Carey was also booked on The Arsenio Hall Show before the album was released. While still an unknown, she sang on a broadcast of last year's N.B.A. championship playoffs. Getting that kind of exposure for a new artist is difficult, and Mr. Mottola is credited with using his considerable muscle to arrange the appearances.
It is unusual, although not unheard of, for top executives at a large record company to take so much interest in a new artist. Clive Davis, the chairman of Arista Records, is considered the force behind Ms. Houston's career, and Mr. Koppelman, whose SBK Records has launched some of the biggest new artists this year, including the rapper Vanilla Ice, has been known to pick up the phone and call record stores to plug his acts.
In addition to overseeing production of her album, arranging her television appearances and helping marshal Sony's promotional might behind her, Mr. Mottola introduced Ms. Carey to Champion, the artist-management company he helped found and held an interest in. Mr. Mottola says he has since divested himself of interest in Champion, who has represented Ms. Carey since 1989.
How lucrative her success has been for Sony is impossible to determine. But the elaborate campaign has given the company a best-selling pop singer and positioned Ms. Carey for a long career, although there is certainly no guarantee she will find favor with fans the next time out.
Great expectations — and dollars — also greeted Patty Smythe, who left Columbia after her second album, which was a dud. The last female vocalist to get this kind of push from Ms. Carey's company was Cyndi Lauper, a far more original singer. Ms. Lauper's 1983 album She's So Unusual, sold four million copies. A Night to Remember — just her third album, released last year — sold less than 500,000 copies.
