Northlane frontman auditions spike royalties

Last night it was announced Marcus Bridge is to replace Adrian Fitipaldes as frontman of Sydney melodic hardcore band Northlane.

The 23-year-old Sydneysider beat over 2,000 hopefuls who auditioned via YouTube. The competition, the brainchild of Unified’s Head of Recorded Music Luke Logemann, crossed international borders and trended on Twitter with local media postulating the new recruit’s identity.

The announcement that the band had decided to part ways with Fitipaldes reached 774,400 on Facebook (as of this morning), was ‘liked’ by 7,870 and shared by 2,925.

The independent music company and Northlane’s royalty payments skyrocketed during the audition process through September and October with rightsholders claiming from over 1.5 million YouTube plays from the audition videos using Northlane singles Quantum Flux and Dream Awake.

“It wasn’t actually that thought out,” Logemann told TMN. “We asked people to submit their auditions and to include video with it, and before long we had hundreds of people uploading their videos to YouTube and sharing it. It ended up becoming this huge thing with 1.5 million video plays on the songs across all the videos and auditions. It couldn’t have really worked out any better.”

From August to September, Spotify analytics for Northlane show the band’s tracks were streamed 201,182 times with an average of 3,409 plays per day. The analytics show an impressive spike in mid-September to 20,000 streams, just days after Fitipaldes announced his departure on September 13. Fitipaldes cited mental and physical exhaustion as the reason behind his exit.

While Unified hasn't provided TMN with exact royalty payment figures, the news the tracks' rightsholders did see a spike in royalties speaks volumes in defense of the streaming market's giants. Services like Spotify and Pandora have experienced widely reported growing pains of late with artists like Taylor Swift and Aloe Blacc taking direct action against them.

The official announcement took place on triple j last night where guitarist Josh Smith was interviewed. The news was posted to Facebook and as of this morning, has reached over 939,000, was shared by almost 3,000, ‘liked’ by 8,380 an is currently the #1 trending article.

Northlane also released new single Rot, written and recorded with Bridge and produced via Skype with long-time collaborator Will Putney. The official video was published on Rise Records' (Unified's US partner label) YouTube page and has received 133,000 views in 18 hours so far.