Justin Bieber likes heated toilet seats.
He hates elevators. He thinks Paris is the most romantic city and all girls are beautiful. He wants you to believe dreams come true. He thinks ur awesome.
It is possible to know all these things because the pop star is on Twitter every few hours, offering his thoughts, feelings and shout-outs.
By now, of course, everybody on the planet should realize that Justin Bieber is the Canadian-born, platinum-selling, swaggering 16-year-old with a baby face and a Beatles-redux hairstyle. He has visited the White House and met the Obamas; not only been the musical guest on Saturday Night Live but mugged in skits with Tina Fey; experienced the Midas touch that is an appearance on Oprah and, most recently, been nominated for a Black Entertainment Television Award as best new artist.
“Bieber Fever” has infected a global fan base of teens and tweens who worship him with glitter-painted signs and embryonic lust. They've pushed sales of his first album, My World, to nearly 150,000 in Canada and more than 1.35 million in the U.S.
Now, he is on a worldwide tour to promote his second release, My World 2.0, sparking fan riots from Long Island to Australia.
Online, the video for his song Baby is YouTube's third most viewed of all time. And nearly 2.7 million Twitter followers watch for messages from the Biebs, even if it's simply an update on the Lakers game he's watching.
It all adds up to what one record exec describes as a schoolgirl crush on a massive scale.
The gift here … was that everyone, from my daughter to tens of millions of other girls, now claim this guy as their boyfriend – they own him. — Randy Lennox, head of Universal Music Canada.
“This thing is bigger than any marketing we could have concocted,” says Lennox, whose parent company also owns Island Def Jam, the Bieber label.
And yet Biebermania was concocted – it is the product of a carefully engineered marketing campaign that plucked a downy kid from small-town Ontario and relocated him to a hip-hop hotbed in the Deep South. In Atlanta, young Justin was transformed from the runner-up of a local talent competition to everybody's boyfriend in what seems like no time.
His throngs of caterwauling fans look like the latest incarnation of Beatlemania, but there is something very different at play here:
To this audience, all the YouTube videos and Twitter messages are more than just a digital diversion. They are key factors in the rapid onset and sheer scale of Bieber Fever – and offer concrete evidence, if any more were necessary, of the Internet's commercial might.
PHASE ONE: THE PATTIE PLAN
Performing on The Oprah Winfrey Show is a far cry from the Kiwanis Community Centre in Stratford, a city of 30,000 about 150 kilometres west of Toronto that is far better known for its annual Shakespearean festival than for its pop sensations. It was here that a 12-year-old Justin attracted some of his earliest fans in a competition modelled on American Idol.
Stratford Star was held in a room that can accommodate an audience of roughly 200. These days, there are more people than that claiming to be Justin Bieber on Facebook.
“We're the singing competition he lost,” recalls Mimi Price, chief executive officer of the Stratford YMCA, whose youth centre organized the event. She still finds it disorienting to see how polished the also-ran of 2007 has become: “His moves, my goodness!”
Clearly, the early setback didn't stop him – or his mom.
