Terra Naomi has not been overweight since she was a child, but her voice could represent a fat lady’s for the music industry in the not-too-distant future.

After a frustrating and short relationship with a big label (Island Records), singer/songwriter Terra Naomi decided to return to being her own boss and pursue her music career by marketing herself through the internet—a pursuit that has worked brilliantly thus far.

Terra Naomi before she became a YouTube phenomenon

Naomi was a self-proclaimed “big nerd” as a kid growing up in New York.  After graduating high-school, she attended the University of Michigan School of Music where she studied opera and claims on her website to have abused drugs.

In the early 2000s, Naomi cleaned herself up, returned to New York, wrote her first songs, got her first guitar and played her first gigs.  In 2003, she moved to Los Angeles; and, in 2006, she started a YouTube Virtual Tour that would put her on the music map—only one of the big, very detailed maps, but the main map nonetheless.

Terra Naomi’s ascent in the music industry

Naomi’s virtual tour was seen by millions of people, which made her the number one most subscribed to artist on YouTube.  Naomi beat out the uber-popular, highly financed marketing machine of P. Diddy and company who placed second in 2007.

The video for her sensational, inspirational song “Say It’s Possible” won the first ever YouTube Award for Best Music Video in 2006.  Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth inspired Naomi to write the song.  Naomi later met Gore, and that encounter led to her—who not long ago was nothing but another girl with a passion for music and a webcam—performing the song in front of 75,000 people at Wembley Stadium for the Live Earth Concert.

Terra Naomi gets burned by the music industry, bounces back as an independent

Naomi’s ambitious, relentless work marketing herself through the internet and touring finally got her a record deal in January of 2007—Naomi signed with major label Island Records and moved to Europe.  Unfortunately for Naomi, things went downhill from there.

Her debut release for Island Records, Under the Influence first came out in the U.K.  Extremely unhappy with the results, Naomi managed to stop the album from being released in the U.S.

“The album would come to define everything I did not want to be and was one of the biggest lessons of my life…BE TRUE TO MYSELF,” Naomi says of Under the Influence on her website.

Numerous other artists have had experiences frightfully similar to Naomi’s regarding the record industry and big labels pushing them to be something they are not.  Examples include everyone from brilliant anti-folk songstress Nellie McKay (Sony Records) to one-time industry-leading popstars Michelle Branch (Maverick Records) and Vanessa Carlton (A&M Records).

Terra Naomi left Island Records after being unable to forge a good working relationship, and she moved back to Los Angeles in June of 2008.

Naomi recently posted a “Tour Support Fund Drive” video on YouTube, and she raised an astonishing $5,000 in just two weeks.  Naomi began her tour in mid-October.

As thanks to her public, Naomi created some very humorous (but sometimes innocently vulgar) videos with brief songs about the cities in which she will visit on her tour.  The videos can be seen on Naomi’s ever popular YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/terranaomi.

This tour is in support of her new EP You for Me, which became available on iTunes starting October 20.  A new album, this time the way she wants it, is scheduled to come out in early 2010.

Naomi has made mistakes in her personal life and career through which she has managed to persevere.  Her determination to remain true to herself combined with her achievements as a musician through independent virtual marketing makes her a modern music pioneer and one of the most important role models in music today.  This cannot be overstated.

Naomi and other artists like her represent the biggest threat to the unfair dominance of the media oligopoly in the music industry since big corporations took over the entertainment business in the 1980s.