Music

Read what N-Dubz had to say in 2007

Those wacky capitalists are a funny bunch. On the one hand, they’re moaning about not having enough money. Yet on the other, they’re baldly refusing to raid the piggy banks of the nation’s youth. After all, what else are the kids of today supposed to spend their pocket money on now it’s illegal to target them with ads for junk food, fizzy drinks and fags? The UK music industry’s failure to capitalise on an existing scene is ably demonstrated by N-Dubz, who finally release their debut album this week after nine years of doing it for themselves.

Older readers may remember the last time we featured Dappy, Tulisa and Fazer, aka N-Dubz, back in October 2007, just after they won the Mobo for Best Newcomer without the aid of a record company. Following this fame injection, the band were picked up by major label Polydor, home of 50 Cent and Girls Aloud. So far, so not surprising – after all, nobody took any notice of unsigned trance-metal teens Enter Shikari until they sold out the Astoria. What is surprising is that the label failed to profit from this position. A re-release of fan favourite ‘You Better Not Waste My Time’ charted at a respectable-ish Number 22 (around the same as Dizzee Rascal’s last three pre-‘Dance Wiv Me’ releases), but failed to set the zeitgeist alight because most people, as Dappy points out, had already downloaded the track a year earlier. Feature continues

‘It’s very important to build up your own underground fanbase,’ says Tulisa, ‘because they will be the ones that buy your records. I think re-releasing “Better Not Waste My Time” was a mistake Polydor made because they weren’t aiming at our main fanbase, they were reaching out for a new fanbase. It did gain us new fans, but at the same time, we missed out on how many thousands of fans we already had, because we didn’t bring out a fresh track.’

Ultimately, the band asked to be released from their contract and went back to doing things the old-fashioned way: over the internet. Still in their early twenties, the group put their own money into self-produced internet sensation, ‘Ouch’, a kind of dwarf-free ‘Trapped In The Closet’ which introduced the phrase ‘My name’s Shaniqua and what?’ to a startled public. The video has had around ten million views in the past five months and spawned a surf-worthy surfeit of tribute videos.