Artist Research

Gabrielle Aplin is an 18 year old self-taught acoustic/folk artist from Bath, England. She began her musical career uploading acoustic and piano song covers onto YouTube in early 2008 - perhaps one of her most popular covers being that of the You Me At Six song, 'The Liar And The Lighter' which has to date received over 360,000 views. In total, she has received over 3 million plays on YouTube, at an average of around 10,000 hits per day, and is currently the 16th most subscribed YouTube channel. In addition to this, she has over 1.2 million plays on MySpace, and previously held the number 1 spot on the MySpace unsigned artist chart. She recently released her debut offering, entitled 'Acoustic EP', which reached number 12 in the iTunes Pop chart, and number 26 in the overall Main chart. She has recently witnessed a growing amount of success, performing sold out gigs across the country, and being featured on the Radio 1 homepage as well as in the Sunday Mirror.

Her target audience is mainly focused around the teenage to young adult market, more inclined towards a female rather than male audience due to many of the lyrical themes throughout her songs. As she is a young female artist herself, her lyrics are mainly from a female perspective, and tend to cover topics such as family, friendships, relationships and growing up. Her image tends to be quite feminine and innocent, as is quite a typical feature of the folk genre, as opposed to perhaps the more glamorous and sexualised approach that would likely within the mainstream pop genre. Her influences include the likes of Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, The Fray, Matt Corby, Bob Dylan and Carole King.

http://www.myspace.com/gabrielleaplin

There are a number of parallels between Gabrielle Aplin and more successful artists, such as Southampton singer / songwriter Joe Brooks for example.

Both artists gained initial success by uploading videos of them acoustically covering songs from their bedrooms onto YouTube. From this they began to garner public interest, with success rapidly soaring with more and more views. MySpace also played a key part in the development of both of the artists careers, as both constantly top the MySpace unsigned charts, and used it as a platform to showcase their music in a quick, easy and cost effective manner, as well as to communicate with fans. Both artists regularly perform sold out shows across the UK, with the heightened commercial success of Brooks now taking his career over to Los Angeles. Having received label interest from quite some time, he eventually chose to sign to Lave Records in the US, which is a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group. Were Gabrielle Aplin to achieve relative commercial success and sign to a major label, Lava may be a viable option.