#148: Who Is Your Exchange Student?

You work with only the best. They do a great job. And yet, it might not be enough for that long-awaited breakthrough.

Could it be that a complete stranger made all the difference? What about an exchange student spending a few months in your country?

The story of Roxette, Sweden’s number two music export after ABBA, as told on Wikipedia suggests just that.

It was while studying in Sweden that an American exchange student from Minneapolis, Dean Cushman, heard “The Look” and brought a copy of Look Sharp! home for the 1988 holiday break. He gave the album to a Minneapolis radio station, KDWB 101.3 FM. The station started playing “The Look”; based on positive caller feedback, the song became very popular, and quickly spread to other radio stations.

That sounds pretty straight forward, doesn’t it?

He spends some time in a foreign country, listens to the local music, buys an album of a band he likes, bings it back home, hands it over to a local radio station, they play it, everything else is history.

As always, reality is slightly more complex than that. It is the small things that decide on which way something goes.

Luckily, I learned about the small things making the big difference in Roxette’s success story straight from the horse’s mouth in an interview with Per Gessle, one of the two band members.

Apparenetly, the US radio station didn’t play the song right away. It hadn’t been on air once when Dean Cushman returned to pick up his album and spoke to the programme director who liked the newspaper themed album cover. Thanks to Cushman reaffirming the quality of the music over and above the band’s graphic talent, the song «The Look» was finally played. And now the rest is history.

Roxette did the work, no doubt, but it was Cushman who literally pushed them over the finisher line.

Don’t wait for the «finisher» to show up before you start doing the work. And, equally importantly, treat every stranger as if they could be your Cushman.

As they say in Sweden, «tack».