Probably no more than a couple of the queens of rock or pop have exhibited the sort of sales muscle that country diva Shania Twain flaunts.
Twain has dwarfed her Nashville sisters by selling more than 10 million copies of a single CD, “The Woman in Me” (roughly 6 million or so more copies sold than any other country female has been able to sell of a single album), plus another million (and counting) of its recently released successor, “Come On Over.” And she has accomplished these feats without setting foot on the concert trail, a fact making the achievement doubly prodigious.
In the process, she may have established a new prototype for the creation and maintenance of megastardom.
Her method?
Radically expand the number of songs in albums as well as the intervals between these albums’ release. Increase the number of planned radio singles from these albums. Put top priority on recording uniquely commercial music rather than on harvesting the profits of concert touring. Aggressively employ TV, rather than concerts, as the primary vehicle to call attention to your music in the marketplace.
And when people think they’ve got you figured out, change. Twain vows not to neglect the road much longer.
“I’m not going to tempt fate a second time,” she says.
But there’s more to the selling of Shania Twain. Mercury Records boss Luke Lewis and senior sales vice president John Grady report:
– They plan to release a succession of no less than “at least” 10 radio singles from “Come On Over” (from its total of 16 tracks), meaning that the package has every chance of being aggressively represented on radio for most if not all of the next couple of years.
– With “Come On Over” (in contrast to “Woman”), Mercury will attempt to take Twain to America’s nearly 1,000 pop stations as well as the 2,500 country ones that were the exclusive players of the songs on “Woman.”
– Her long-awaited concert tour is scheduled to begin early in May in Twain’s native Canada before crossing the border into the United States by the middle of that month.
The trek eventually will go global. Twain manager Jon Landau, who has guided the career of Bruce Springsteen for two decades, says his firm is “very interested in introducing her to Europe,” where Twain already has been selling “some” records, in Landau’s words, “and we want to see if we can help improve on that.”
“We’ll definitely go to Australia,” says Twain.
“And I’m already scheduled to start my promotional touring in Europe. So maybe at the end of a North American leg I’ll start heading over to Europe for concert touring. The intention is to be worldwide.”
In Nashville, where concert touring is generally considered the guts of record marketing, the fact that Twain hasn’t toured recently is heresy. But she points out that it wasn’t the product of some “grand plan.”
First, she recalls, she didn’t want to go out on the road with no hit singles to impress audiences. By the time “The Woman in Me” had yielded enough hit singles to do that, one of them was the supersmash “Any Man of Mine,” and the album was selling in such numbers that she could envision headlining. Which meant she needed still more hits.
Then she and her producer/husband, Robert J. (Mutt) Lange, realized that they had created the kind of momentum that demanded a follow-up album as carefully crafted as “The Woman In Me.”
The choice wasn’t without risk.
“The risk I took,” Twain notes, “was that if I hadn’t come up with an album that had (more) hits, then I never would have gotten the chance to tour.”
But “Come On Over” turned out to have hits immediately, the first two being “Love Gets Me Every Time” and “Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You).” Now the third single, “You’re Still The One,” is being offered to country and pop music radio stations.
A crossover attempt seems apropos because Twain isn’t country in any traditional sense. In her words, “it’s all original music” that comes from inside herself and then is combined with the production genius of Lange, the man behind such previous 10 million sellers as Def Leppard and Bryan Adams.
Twain has her own style, musically and otherwise. She thunderstruck Nashville with a decision to bare her navel on album covers and in videos.
“Wearing midriff clothes was nothing new to the rest of the world, so I was actually surprised at the reaction,” she explains. “More of my record buyers are women–not that men don’t buy my records, too–but it (her music) does seem to relate more to women in a lot of ways. And I think that they’re very appreciative of the fact that I demand to be respected for what I’m thinking and for the way I look.”
She also believes they identify with her sexy indomitability.
“You know, if you go to work in a skirt and your boss puts his hand up your skirt, you don’t then come to work with pants on the next day,” she says. “You wear a skirt again. You don’t give in and say, `Well, I guess I shouldn’t wear skirts to work.’
“That’s not the way you change things and turn people’s minds around. That’s my take on it, anyway. And I think women relate very well to that.”
