Justin Bieber performs on Radio 1's Big Weekend last week in Bangor, Wales.Samir Hussein/Getty Images
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.
"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.
A single mother who was only 18 when Justin was born, Pattie Mallette was responsible for her son's first marketing campaign. After Stratford Star, she posted grainy videos on YouTube that showed Justin singing at home. It was all out-of-the-mouths-of-babes R&B - songs by Chris Brown, Ne-Yo and Usher. The videos caught on, and soon the audience included Kaitlin Lennox. She was 11 at the time, and so euphoric at what she saw that she dragged her music-executive father to the laptop.
Mr. Lennox was so impressed by his daughter's find (for Kaitlin, a story to generate schoolyard clout if ever there was one) that he called his counterparts at Universal in the U.S., only to find they were already on the case.
A budding hip-hop Svengali named Scott (Scooter) Braun also had come upon the videos while trolling YouTube in search of talent. "I was consulting for [rapper]Akon on another act he had, and I had just decided to start my own record label and management company," Mr. Braun recalls in a phone conversation from New York. "I saw this kid, and like, went crazy."
He tracked down Justin and his mother, calling Ms. Mallette repeatedly. It took two hours on the phone, but he persuaded her to let him fly them to Atlanta to meet him - their first time on a plane, he says. They hit it off, and within two weeks, Mr. Braun had become Justin's manager.
PHASE TWO: SCOOTER'S STRATEGY
His first step, Mr. Braun says, was to help Justin build his Internet presence, especially on YouTube. "I said, 'We're going to do this like no one's ever seen before.'"
The former party promoter and record-label employee, now 28, also worked his connections, introducing his Justin to Justin Timberlake and to the R&B singer who would become his pop mentor, Usher Raymond. The two stars competed for a deal. Mr. Braun decided to work with Usher, partly because he didn't want his protégé to wind up simply as Little Justin, next to Mr. Timberlake.
"I also felt like, Usher, being African-American, brought a different sensibility to Justin, a different amount of, I would say, credibility within the black community," Mr. Braun adds. "Here's this little white kid singing soul music, from Canada. He needed someone to make people understand that's who he really was."
And it didn't hurt, when it came to negotiating with Island Def Jam head L.A. Reid, to have perhaps his label's most successful star on board. Usher and Mr. Braun created the Raymond Braun Music Group, and signed with Mr. Reid in 2008. RBMG handles the production and marketing of Justin Bieber while Island Def Jam supports him and his mother, and handles distribution.
Before he was even in high school, Justin had left Straford for Atlanta, and by the time he was 15, he had a No.1 record. But that success didn't roll out in the usual way.
"When we did the deal, L.A. was like, 'What TV show are we going to do, to break him?' And I was like, 'L.A., Justin's going to be the first artist to become a huge mainstream superstar based on the Internet and not based on anything else,'" Mr. Braun says.
He continues to cultivate Justin's following on YouTube and on Twitter.
"If I see he's not Twittering, I tell him, 'Get on your Twitter.' Because it's how his fans relate to him. They made him, you know? The moment he disappears from them, they feel like they've lost that kid from YouTube that invited them into his living room.
"We were very strategic in how we did that. … Our main marketing point is self-discovery and the power of the fans." Even Justin's mother is on Twitter, as @studiomom.
Keeping up that intense feeling of personal connection via the Internet is incredibly important in marketing to the Bieber demographic, says Rob Bowman, who teaches popular music at York University.
"You're appealing to a certain adolescent group who've got fairly innocent notions of romance," explains the specialist in soul music and Grammy-award winner for best album notes. "These 12- and 13-year-olds ... it's a huge part of the bonding aspect, this innocent crush."
As his popularity has ballooned, the singer has cultivated that crush. Plenty of celebrities have discovered the Internet, and its power to let them tell strangers what they had for breakfast. But in this case, the payoff is more tangible. Bieber fanatics have proved eager to help market him, fuelling his sales as well as his celebrity.
It likely takes him a matter of minutes to copy a message such as this one sent by fan @GillianLovesJBx to his Twitter home page - "@justinbieber Do u respond to a simple I Love You? :)" - and then reply, for all the world to see, "I love u 2...i love all u ladies :)."
But that small amount of effort can produce immeasurable rewards: Fans blessed with a bit of attention will turn around and encourage others to buy his albums, post messages when they request his songs on the radio, and talk about how much they want tickets to his shows.
From a business perspective, all that online assistance is priceless, according to Stephen Gash, whose six years in marketing in the music industry included a stint at Universal.
"The Justin Bieber phenomenon is really the embodiment of any label's dream launch plan, because essentially, the fans did the work ... that creates a real sense of authenticity," says Mr. Gash, now with Malivoire, a Niagara winery. "It's not The Man, it's not the label, saying you've got to buy ... you're trading the link."
Social-media marketing has become a buzzword par fatiguance - Mr. Gash says labels now strive continually to establish their acts on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook - but it's rare to happen upon an artist whose following is ready-made, the way Mr. Braun ensured that Justin's would be.
In April, 2008, before he had a record deal, nearly 600,000 people had watched Justin Bieber singing Ne-Yo's Because of You. By YouTube standards, it's no cat playing the piano, but it's respectable for a kid with a camcorder. Now, his production values are higher, and his most popular videos are watched more than 100 million times each.
Those millions of young fans are attracted by the same characteristics as other teen heartthrobs, says York's Mr. Bowman, citing such boy band predecessors as the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync.
"That's following in a trend that started about 10, 15 years ago, where you have white groups packaging R&B but in a very safe, homogenized way."
Thanks to the team of advisers now managing the Bieber brand, Justin balances his clean-cut, smiley look with a soupçon of attitude: big baseball caps, chain necklaces and outfits as hip as possible for a white kid with a button nose.
Much of this image-making is credited to road manager Ryan Good, who has been called his "swagger coach," a term Mr. Braun dismisses as something Justin invented to tease Mr. Good after hip-hop mogul Diddy asked where he'd got all his swagger.
The title may be a joke, but great care is taken to keep the young star seeming cool but approachable - to a point.
PHASE THREE: NEAR BUT FAR
His image and his Twitter personality make him seem ultra-accessible, but it's not so easy to get to Justin Bieber in person. Universal Music Canada's Mr. Lennox says that was part of the label's strategy.
Last November, just two weeks before his first album was released, Justin performed at Kool Haus, a club in downtown Toronto. Despite the frigid weather, people lined up and Mr. Lennox says demand far outstripped the roughly 2,000 tickets made available.
Management arranged several shows in smaller venues, he says, as a kind of staging ground for the massive tour now under way. When Justin returns to Toronto, one of three Canadian stops, he will play the Air Canada Centre, which seats 19,800, almost 10 times the Kool Haus audience.
Even back then, "he could have played a venue 10 to 15 times larger," Mr. Lennox explains. "That was very much part of our strategy. It was creating pent-up demand."
Of course, pent-up teenage girls can be dangerous. There have been fan riots in New Zealand and Australia as well the one in Long Island that led to Mr. Braun being charged after police accused him of not acting quickly enough when asked to use Twitter to help disperse the crowd.
The pandemonium has not been lost on organizers of next month's annual MuchMusic Video Awards. "With Bieber Fever, we're expecting it to be huge," says Sheila Sullivan, the show's executive producer.
She is sitting in her office in downtown Toronto, looking over an artist's renderings of the five outdoor stages to be used in the show. She isn't sure which one the hot young star will use, but says one thing has been planned already: the security detail. "We've always been very successful having a great event and a calm event."
Ms. Sullivan says the fans are surprisingly obedient, especially those waiting by the red carpet for a glimpse of the passing stars. "There's nowhere else they could go and actually touch Justin Bieber. So they're on their best behaviour."
Security for the show will be much the same as in past years (at least 20 pay-duty police officers and 100 private security guards, as well as medical staff to deal with fainting and other maladies), but Ms. Sullivan is concerned about what will happen the week before when tickets are handed out.
PHASE FOUR: 'THE NEW MODEL'
On one level, this kind of popularity is an old story. Bieber fans who beg for a reply to their tweets that will make their dreams come true are kindred spirits with the be-legginged 11-year-olds who pressed their lips to New Kids on the Block posters or the screamers in the audience for The Ed Sullivan Show who wept while reaching for their favourite Beatle.
Those girls, however, didn't buy music the way that today's worshippers of the pop pantheon do. Just as the Internet has changed how fans interact with their idols, it has changed how they judge the value of their favourite hits. Mr. Lennox says Universal now markets very carefully. A generation trained to pay a dollar per song on iTunes is savvy about price points, he says, and won't shell out $20 for an album any more.
Instead, Island Def Jam has priced both Justin's physical CDs and digital downloads closer to teenagers' expectations - and their weekly allowances. The 10 songs on My World cost $10.99, and the label has kept the music coming. The normal business model calls for an album to have a run of close to a year, but Island Def Jam chose to do "mini-albums," with fewer songs, lower prices and a shorter shelf life. My World was followed by My World 2.0 after just four months, in a bid to stoke demand and keep fans expressing their love with their wallets.
"There's no question this album, 2.0, will be bigger than the first one," Mr. Lennox says. Just over two months after its release, it has already reached 80 per cent of the sales for My World in the U.S., and both albums have gone platinum (here the first one was judged double platinum by Canada's more modest benchmark).
And there is more to come. "There are further mini-albums out there," Mr. Lennox says. "This was not a series of tests leading up to a bigger album. … This is the new model."
Now that the label has a success on its hands, the next task will be to make sure that it can outlast puberty, and the normal life cycle of BOP Magazine's cover fodder. Mr. Lennox says the Bieber team wants to prove that Justin is like the Beatles and "not the Monkees."
It is possible to have a seemingly insipid pop idol evolve beyond the teen years. For example, Justin Timberlake is even more successful as a solo artist than he was as 'N Sync's front man, unlike the Backstreet Boys' Nick Carter, who wound up on an ill-fated reality series and is now back touring with the Boys, who are trying to recapture the massive fame they once enjoyed.
The label is praying for the Timberlake trajectory, which Mr. Lennox says will be helped by the fact that there's more to Justin Bieber than a youthful voice and a few dance moves. He plays piano and guitar - he famously busked on the streets of Stratford as a kid - and on Oprah, he jumped on the drums for a solo executed with a self-satisfied grin.
"This kid is an authentic artist," Mr. Lennox says. "There's a real promise of longevity."
PHASE FIVE: LOCAL HERO
His hometown certainly seems to think he has staying power. The Stratford Tourism Alliance recently made headlines by issuing a "Bieber-iffic Map" of the city for visitors more inclined to stare googly-eyed at the Subway outlet their idol patronized than to see Christopher Plummer in The Tempest.
Something tourists won't find on their walkabout of "Justin's Stratford" is, ironically, the place where he showed early signs of the work ethic now required of him: the YMCA's youth centre.
Located in a storefront near the Y and run by Angie Adair, who helped to organize the singing competition back in 2007, the centre has a karaoke machine Justin used during the month of weekly Stratford Star shows to practise - sometimes so much that Ms. Adair had to shut him down.
She also remembers the tiny showman as the only contestant who changed between numbers - donning a baggy sweater for a Matchbox 20 song, khakis and a sideways hat to croon in the style of Alicia Keys. "By the end of it, there were definitely some Bieber fans, with their signs, screaming," she says.
Pattie Mallette saw potential in those fledgling fans. She was always trying to find places for her son to get exposure, including a local autism fundraiser and a CD release party for a local food bank.
Just months after Justin's first go-round at Stratford Star, Ms. Mallette called the YMCA to find out when she could sign him up for the next year's competition. But by the time the youth centre had the registration forms ready, she and Justin had moved to Georgia.
Despite all the success since then, the Stratford Star judges stand by Justin's runner-up finish, Ms. Adair says. "It was a maturity issue ... he was up against 15-, 18-year-olds."Mimi Price of the YMCA nods in agreement. "I always said, 'He needs a few vocal lessons,'" she says. "Now, it's just amazing to watch. ... I see him on Oprah, for goodness sake."