Given the obscene amounts of money on offer to firms who can get their internet marketing and retailing strategies sorted, I'm quite surprised that the music industry has thus far responded so sluggishly. After the success of the Arctic Monkeys and Gnarls Barkley though, the heads seem to be well and truly out of the sand in music land. Scottish "rock chick" Sandi Thom – as if the world needed another Joss Stone look- and sound-a-like – is the latest nobody to have rocketed to semi-stardom on the back of a canny PR campaign which made full use of the net as a marketing tool and virtual performance space, all in a very Web 2.0 kinda way.

The story, spun however it was by Quite Great PR, went something like this. Ms Thom, fed up with lukewarm audience receptions up and down the land to her brand of middle-of-the-road rock, and her erratic touring vehicle, decided to tout her wares via a series of webcast concerts broadcast live from her basement flat in Tooting. And lo and behold, she found an audience, probably attracted by the fact that they didn't have to travel an hour to a venue, stand behind the tallest person in the auditorium and breathe in second-hand smoke for two hours. Or it may have been that they liked the fact that they could switch off the PC and make a cup of tea when they got fed up with the music. Whatever the reasons, or the PR hype machine, or the alleged extensive advertising on MySpace, sending a million e-flyers and targeting the student press, the audience figures are pretty impressive – anywhere from 70,000 to over 100,000 depending on what papers you read.

There have been various efforts to discredit this rags to e-riches story, including the accusation in one broadsheet that she couldn't possible have supported the 70,000-plus high-bandwidth streams running concurrently that would have been necessary to claim such audience figures. Well, actually this little job was done by specialist streaming company Streaming Tank. But a word of advice to anyone hoping to emulate the girl from Banff – once the novelty has worn off and webcast concerts become more commonplace, it's going to get very hard to make your voice stand out from the crowd – without some expensive PR. Watch out for thousands of wannabes following suit over the coming months.