![]() ![]() “I come from a generation where these huge follower counts are normal,” she said. Yet every date on that spring 2015 run sold out in less than 30 minutes, and Halsey soon graduated to an arena tour, opening this summer for the million-selling rock band Imagine Dragons and often packing the front rows despite being first on the three-act bill. “500- to 1,000-capacity rooms weren’t an underplay for me at the time. “I cultivated this fan base that I really didn’t really understand or appreciate until I put my first headlining tour up for sale,” she said. Halsey, who is preternaturally self-possessed and becomes gleeful in moments of defiance, slips into music-business-speak with the same ease with which she curses or describes her favorite websites. Mendlinger said of the singer’s social media army, made up more of advocates than of passive fans. “We saw how she was already connecting, so we knew that was an avenue we needed to pursue with her,” Mr. I put all the groundwork in myself, and they let me do my thing, because it’s working.” “That was one of the proudest moments of my entire life. “I remember walking into Capitol Records, sitting down with the executives and having them say, ‘Look at what you did while none of us were paying attention,’ ” Halsey said over bubble tea in the East Village in April. By the festival’s end, Twitter had named her most-tweeted-about artist, ahead of Miley Cyrus. Outside the club, another cluster of young people pressed against a single window to catch a glimpse. But at an event all about manufacturing the appearance of buzz, Halsey’s needed no fluffing: Amid the label types, teenage girls stood rapt at the front of a small stage, many of them holding up cellphones and beaming the performance via video chat to tearful friends at home. In March, Halsey had her industry coming-out party at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Tex. “Actually, they’ve just kind of let me take the wheel.” “Being a pop-leaning, female artist, you’d think that I’d have my record company breathing down my neck and trying to control everything I’m doing,” Halsey said while finishing “Badlands” in the spring. It’s a rare tightrope walk pulled off by other web-driven artists like Lorde and Lana Del Rey.īut with “Badlands,” a brooding, conceptual electro-pop record with industrial undertones and big radio-ready hooks, Halsey has realized not just her label’s vision but also her own. ![]() 28, Halsey will attempt to translate the secret language she shares with her online followers for a wider audience without losing its essential intimacy. With the release of her first album, “Badlands,” on Aug. Now, with her nearly half a million followers on Twitter and more on Instagram contributing to the heavy lifting, the singer and her label - Astralwerks, an electronic imprint under Capitol Music - have set the stage for a potential mainstream breakthrough. Instead of a viral flash of Internet lightning, Halsey, unfiltered and fast-talking, has been nurtured as an artist who could harness lasting loyalty online, not just one-off clicks. Frangipane’s pop-star alter ego, to have taken that innate 21st-century talent for self-presentation - not to mention songwriting - from her bedroom to arena stages in a mere year since signing with a record label. It was one thing for Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a kid from New Jersey, to have 14,000 friends on MySpace at age 14 and 16,000 subscribers on YouTube at 18. ![]()
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