A star is born

When United Airlines baggage handlers famously broke Dave Carroll’s guitar during a stopover in Chicago a year ago, it looked like his small music business had just taken a $3,500 equipment hit. For many airline passengers like him, compensation would require endless time and patience for what’s often a fruitless pursuit. So Carroll did what he does best: He wrote a song and posted it on YouTube. Overnight, it became a viral sensation, and a new Dave Carroll was born: vigilante entrepreneur

After 20 years of hard work playing with his band Sons of Maxwell, musician Dave Carroll suddenly found himself in a media frenzy in the spring of 2009. Almost overnight he went from playing solo in pubs across Canada and selling his CDs at “merch” tables to doing hundreds of interviews around the world, from CTV to CNN and the BBC. During that time, tens of millions of people heard his music and wanted to buy it.

“Right away, my business hat went on,” says Carroll. His website kept crashing under the onslaught, and his mother, who was in charge of mailing his CDs from her home in Waverly, N.S., raced to keep up with demand. His wife, Jill, had just given birth to their first child; she spent her days answering the phone with one hand while breastfeeding baby Flynn.

It was clear that Dave Carroll Music needed help to capitalize on the attention. Carroll called in his father-in-law, Brent Sansom, who drove down from New Brunswick to become Carroll’s business manager and media contact. As Sansom puts it, Carroll had opened his mouth for a sip of attention with “United Breaks Guitars” but found himself hit by a fire hose. The challenge now was to drink as deeply as possible and try to capture a global audience for future use.

Before United broke his guitar, Carroll played 170 shows a year; Sons of Maxwell was operating on CD sales at live shows and via the Internet. “We didn’t really have any distribution, because every company I’d worked with either went bankrupt owing me money or just before they owed me money,” says Carroll. “I was some people’s favourite songwriter, but it was a relatively small group. Sons of Maxwell had a small legion of devoted fans and enough people interested in our music that we could make it our full-time job. That, by definition, is success in the Canadian music industry.”

The online sales were traditional CDs, but none of Carroll’s music was available in digital form. He had a website and a Facebook page, and his previous biggest YouTube hit had received 5,000 visitors. In the U.S. and Europe, he was a complete unknown.

Enter “United Breaks Guitars.” The song was mainly an act of revenge written in the style Carroll knew best: bouncy, with a memorable sing-a-long chorus. If it could hold a drunken pub crowd for three minutes, he bet it would grab a web audience. He vowed to write three songs in total and get one million hits. “I figured if I told the story accurately and honestly, I’d never have to explain myself,” he says. “The song would have legs of its own.”

Since Carroll couldn’t afford to make a video, he called his old friends at Halifax-based Curve Productions and told them his story. They agreed to donate their time. “We fly a lot, so we’ve all had some bad experiences,” says Curve’s Lara Cassidy. “To be honest, we were seeking a little revenge of our own.” Curve, which went on to foot the bill for the next two videos, also co-owns them and is using them as a high-profile calling card.

“We’re proud of the videos,” says Cassidy. “Much to our surprise, the one project we did for a lark has actually created the exposure we needed.” The video was filmed over a weekend at Carroll’s volunteer fire department in Waverly (a volunteer firefighter himself, his fellow firefighters played the baggage handlers).

“I really didn’t know what I was doing at the time,” says Carroll. “I just knew that with social media, if you made something that looked good, sounded good, and made people want to tell their friends about it, then the onus wasn’t on you to create a million views.” He posted the video just before midnight on July 6, 2009. When he went to bed, it had received six hits. When he woke up, it was up to 300.

“I thought, this is awesome! Three hundred hits already!” Carroll recalls. He didn’t know that YouTube counts IP address visits, not views, and was pondering how long it would take to click “refresh” 999,700 times. By lunchtime, the video had passed 5,000 hits; it had zoomed to 25,000 by the end of the day. The Chronicle Herald ran the story, which caught the eye of an American journalist. Meanwhile, Carroll was busy playing a Sons of Maxwell gig in New Glasgow, N.S. “We got offstage,” he says, “and there was a message from [a reporter at] the L.A. Times on my phone.”

Carroll awoke that Thursday morning to the salivating jaws of a media monster in full feeding frenzy. He appeared on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet, replied to a query email from CNN, and headed to CTV’s Live at 5 studio. By then, the YouTube video had surpassed 75,000 hits. Minutes before going on air, Live at 5 co-host Starr Dobson ran up to Carroll to tell him that he was on the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. Carroll did Live at 5, then raced home.

“It was like election central,” Carroll says of that day, with friends and family crowded around his TV. Sandwiched between one report on the Pope and another on President Obama was his “United Breaks Guitars” song. “There are my friends wearing sombreros, singing on the Situation Room wall,” says Carroll. “Wolf was bopping around and smiling. He said, ‘It’s actually a good song too.’ ”

The video exploded, blasting past one million hits by that Friday, two million by Sunday, and four million two weeks later. It exceeded eight million unique visits. But Carroll was overwhelmed by the colossal business opportunity. He turned to Phil Holmes and Ian Cavanagh at Ambir Solutions, a Halifax-based IT consulting company. “Your 15 minutes of fame can be constructive or destructive,” says Holmes. “Dave was going to have to live with the fallout from it for the next 40 years.”

Holmes figured that Carroll could capitalize on his notoriety by changing from a musician to a hybrid musician/public speaker, or he could cash in on short-term endorsements while he was hot. They developed a “purpose map” to gauge what was important to Carroll and which business opportunities could enhance his career without corrupting his core values. “Dave felt as though he had the upper hand from a consumer perspective, and my advice was to try and maintain that moral high ground,” says Holmes. “If he took some short-term jingle business opportunities he would sell his soul, the public would see through that, and it would come back to haunt him.”

So Carroll kept his eye on the high road. “My thinking was to funnel people to the music I wanted them to experience the most,” he says. He quickly got his CD Perfect Blue and the United songs online, pointing visitors there to the Sons of Maxwell site where they could buy his back catalogue. To fully tap into and capture a notoriously transient web audience, he called in Tom McLellan of GrowthClick, a Halifax-based Internet marketing consulting company.

McLellan upgraded Carroll’s email capacity to handle the deluge and bolstered his website to prevent it from crashing. “If you’re running a web server and other tools meant for a small-business audience, you don’t expect to have five million people hitting your website in the space of a week,” says McLellan. He made Carroll’s music available for download directly from Davecarrollmusic.com, so Carroll didn’t have to split revenues with iTunes, and started an online offer of a free download from Perfect Blue if fans entered their email address, which built a massive mailing list.

McLellan’s goal was to help Carroll create an “online cash register.” He was so interested in trying his hand at music promotions that he came on board as a volunteer. Now that he has helped Carroll boost his earnings, he’s a paid consultant for the team. Carroll also helped develop two other websites, Rightsideofright.com and Bigbreaksolutions.com, to channel his demand as a keynote speaker and corporate partner. In March Carroll released his third “United Breaks Guitar” song, ending the saga. “I’m a capitalist,” he says. “My goal isn’t to bring companies down; it’s to compel big companies that are giving bad customer service to do a better job, because it’s better for you and me and them if they’re not losing customers because of a viral video.”

Without the Internet, Carroll doubts his story would have evolved the way it did. Twenty years ago an airline broke American folk singer Tom Paxton’s guitar, and he wrote “Thank You, Republic Airlines” in revenge. His fans enjoyed it, but it didn’t go any further than that. Two decades later the Internet took Carroll’s retribution global, carrying his business with it. England’s Telegraph newspaper recently printed a story about his experience, and the Harvard Business School is now using it as a case study. Carroll’s music is flying (pun intended) off the physical and digital shelves, and he has harnessed a booming career as a keynote speaker on social media and customer relations. Plus, flying has never been more pleasant for him. “The flight crews all recognize me now,” he says, laughing.