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Caitlin and the Boys
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Date: Jun 05, 2099 It was a complex Web, and much of it of her own design, that put my daughter on stage with her idols, the Backstreet Boys, writes Bruce Deachman. Bruce Deachman, The Ottawa Citizen
It had been a hectic few days for A.J., Kevin, Brian, Nick and Howie -- the teen idols appeared on Saturday Night Live, conducted scores of interviews with the media, and held a press conference just minutes earlier on the same stage.
Also on stage, between Kevin and Brian, and perched atop a briefcase on a chair so as not to be dwarfed by the Boys, was my daughter, Caitlin. Caitlin, still in an Ottawa elementary school and much more comfortable with skipping ropes and stuffed animals than she is with any 13-year-old boy, was in Studio 54 with five men whose glossy photographs probably cover more bedroom walls than Pratt & Lambert. "Our first question comes from Annelie Thulin, from Stockholm, Sweden," Caitlin said, swallowing another stomachful of butterflies. The voice of a young Swede came in through the sound system, wondering what changes to the world, were they so empowered, the Backstreet Boys would make. Caitlin's adoring gaze moved from Nick, as he explained how he would take all the world's weapons and jettison them into space, to A.J., who offered his idea of a world full of racial harmony. And then it was Caitlin's stage again, as she introduced the next caller. "It was scary," admits Caitlin, "because I was nervous about meeting the Backstreet Boys, and about getting my lines right. And there were all the cameras there, looking at (me). I kept telling myself, 'OK, you're going to meet the Backstreet Boys ... make sure you can still breathe.' " And so for three-quarters of an hour, a thunderstruck Caitlin shared a magical, Manhattan stage with her fistful of heroes, playing emcee in a world that only a week earlier was completely foreign and unthinkably unattainable. It was a complex Web, indeed, and much of it of her own design, that put her on that stage. - - - About 16 months earlier, on Jan. 2, 1998, the Backstreet Boys -- a tightly-choreographed, commercially-manufactured singing group cast in the mould of the profitable New Kids on the Block of the early 1990s -- played their second concert in as many years at the Corel Centre. Caitlin was there, and revisiting the band's live performance fanned the embers smouldering in a young heart. Surfing the Web and poring over Teen Beat magazines with girlfriends, she decided that she wanted her own Backstreet Boys Web site. She enlisted the help of her stepfather, John West, a software developer who agreed to do the initial setup if Caitlin and her friends decided what was to be included on the site. "I told her to sit down and think about what she wanted on the page, and to gather some pictures that we could scan in," said West. And so was born backstreet.net, essentially a forty-watt player on a superhighway of bright lights and big cities. The original site had fewer than ten pages; it consisted of biographies of each of the members, some rumours, a few photos, and that was about it. Still, it was a Backstreet Boys site, and got some hits right off the bat. "In the first day," recalls West, "we got 50 or 60 hits, and nobody even knew about us. It was quite interesting." Caitlin, too, was surprised by the interest. "Mine was just a small, little (site) in the middle of a whole bunch of others. It made me feel good that someone would go to my page instead of someone else's." Having what seemed a modestly successful site prompted Caitlin to add more pages. She and some slumber-party girlfriends came up with an interactive Backstreet Boys quiz. She also added a guest book, which allowed surfers to leave their comments about the site. "We were getting lots of people giving us suggestions," said West, "about what could be on there. So the page just kept growing." One fan from Sweden sent a sketch she drew of one of the Boys, offering it to Caitlin for her site. That spawned an entire virtual gallery of Backstreet Boys art, as portraits came in from all over the world. Today, the site houses about 170 pieces of art. A chat-room was developed, too; as safe a chat-room as a young girl might find, with a monitor built in that immediately sent any foul-fingered or vitriolic typists off and away to the Disney Web site. And on it went, growing larger and larger. Caitlin went into business of sorts, re-selling the Backstreet Boys' first CD, which was released everywhere except the U.S., and the Canadian version of their second one, which, slightly different than its American counterpart, is a must for the collections of many of the BSB-obsessed teens. Sales never amounted to much, however. As West points out, "The problem with Backstreet Boys fans is that they don't have credit cards." What they do have, though, is an almost insatiable appetite for news and photos of their dreamy Fab Five. By the beginning of this month, the site contained about 750 pages and 6,000 photographs, and roughly 40,000 fans were logging on to the site each week. An article this spring in the American Girl's Life magazine, about girl-powered Web sites, listed Caitlin's as one of a handful worth looking at. Another glossy U.S. fan-zine, 'Starz!', asked Caitlin to write for them. "That was really cool," she admits. "Getting the magazines in the mail and reading something with my name in it." But the coolest thing was yet to come. Caitlin's site caught the attention of the Backstreet Boys band. Keyboardist Tommy Smith e-mailed Caitlin to ask for help with a Web site he was designing for the band. Then two events separately conspired to sublimate Caitlin's pentium world into almost unbelievable proportions: Somebody, somewhere, sent her a copy of Millennium, fully five weeks before its release date. At the same time, in Encino, California, a company called Ultimate Band List, or UBL.com for short, was sifting through a thousand contest entrants, trying to decide which one had the best Backstreet Boys Web site. The CD arrived anonymously, presumably from someone involved in its production. In no time at all, Caitlin had snippets of it up online, to the absolute thrill, no doubt, of 6,000 fans daily. "The Millennium CD came from a girl who said that she liked my Web page a lot," recalls Caitlin. "She said that she worked for the company that made it, and that she and a friend decided to send me one. "But then I got in all sorts of trouble with other people because they didn't know how we got it." Those "other people" were from BMG Music, in Toronto, who distribute the Backstreet Boys' music in Canada. Caitlin had unknowingly crossed an imaginary line in the sand of the virtual beach. Nobody, it seems, much cares about copyright infringements when it comes to things like photographs. There are more than 2,000 Backstreet Boys Web sites worldwide and, except for the official one, backstreetboys.com, it's unlikely any have permission to use the photos they do, or pay any royalties on them. And that's just Backstreet Boys sites; never mind 'N Sync, The Spice Girls or any other of the countless fan-driven stops along the hard drive. The unauthorized use of photos on the Web is simply too prevalent to police. And record companies don't look good when they prosecute their fans, especially the ones doing much of the marketing and promotional work for them. But once a fan puts music on the Web, especially since the arrival of the high-quality, space-saving digital music player, MP3, the very existence of those record companies becomes threatened. So it shouldn't, in hindsight, have been all that surprising when I answered the telephone and heard the BMG man's voice asking for Caitlin. The people at BMG, he told me, "weren't at all happy." "The Backstreet Boys," he added, "weren't going to make any money" because of my daughter's actions. A specious argument at best, but one that Caitlin and West wisely decided not to challenge. The music stopped and BMG went away. In Encino, meanwhile, UBL.com had chosen Caitlin's site as the best Backstreet Boys Web site in the world. UBL is to the music industry what Amazon.com is to the book world. They list thousands of bands and sell CDs and other music-related merchandise. They operate the official Backstreet Boys Web site and are the band's authorized merchandiser of posters, T-shirts and all the other paraphernalia that goes with making music these days. By linking their site to those entering the contest (that was the deal, you see), they positioned themselves just a mouse-click away from an unending stream of potential customers. Young ones, true, and without credit cards, but still ... - - - And so ends the story of how my daughter, as winner of the contest, found herself flown to New York, put up in a hotel, ferried about in a limo, loaded with $300 spending money, and ushered on to the stage of Studio 54 with five larger-than-life icons of her generation. Or so it might seem. But what's a grand tale without a cautionary ending? If you fly too close to the sun, they say, your wax wings will surely melt. And if you take along too much luggage, you'll fall twice as fast. On the second day after the Backstreet Boys' CD release, and three days after the "fan conference," an astounding half-million pages from Caitlin's Web site were visited. The response from Caitlin's server, magma.ca, was clear and precise: either cut back the volume, pay $350 a day, or be shut down. And so Caitlin began to dismantle, stripping the site of some of its bulkier features. The chat room had a figurative lock put on its virtual door, and something called "backboard," a bulletin board that many were using as a chat room, was also decommissioned. And while that did stem the outflow, it hasn't slowed down the number of people visiting the site. It still receives 14,000 visitors on weekdays, and up to 20,000 a day on weekends. Caitlin's plans for the site? "Probably make it bigger," she says, "with anything that comes along." She's also given some thought to the possibility that her time with the Backstreet Boys may not be forever. "Then I'll start a new Web page with some other group," she threatens, "but right now I have no idea who."
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Next Item: Backstreet Boys Leave everybody else behind (USA Today) |
The Backstreet Boys sat on the stage of New York's legendary nightclub, Studio 54. Behind the five singers loomed a massive banner announcing the next day's long-awaited release of the Orlando, Florida-based band's latest CD, Millennium.
And now they were ready for a "virtual" fan conference, where 16 of the pop group's fans -- all young and female -- phoned in from around the world to ask questions of their musical knights-in-shining-armour, a sound-and video-clip to be played over and over again on the Internet by an army of adoring fans.
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