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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Myspace helped bring Adele’s music to industry attention, but the available accounts do not show that it was the only way she could have been discovered. Adele said a friend uploaded her music without telling her; manager Jonathan Dickins later recalled hearing her songs online after an XL A&R executive recommended her. Meetings and live performances followed before Adele signed with XL.
How Adele’s music reached Myspace
Adele told Pollstar in 2009 that a friend put her music on Myspace without her knowledge. “He put them on MySpace without me knowing. I didn’t know that MySpace was that influential at the time,” she said. Later, her friend asked what she should do about emails from record companies.
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Sony Music’s artist profile describes the upload as a school-project demo and says it reached XL founder Richard Russell. That is the label’s account of the route; other interviews add detail about referrals and the steps that followed.
What happened after the upload
Adele told Pollstar she was unsure whom to trust after inquiries arrived. When she met people at XL, they pointed her toward Jonathan Dickins, who became her manager.
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Dickins recalled to Music Business Worldwide in 2017: “I’d checked out Adele’s MySpace, and she had Hometown Glory on it, which blew me away.” In a 2018 interview, he said XL A&R executive Nick Huggett recommended Adele to him in 2006. Dickins listened to three songs on her Myspace page, met her, and saw her perform the following week.
That online listening was one part of a sequence that also involved industry referrals and hearing Adele perform in person. Accounts differ in some details: British Vogue’s 2011 profile says Island and XL called after the Myspace post and that Huggett saw Adele perform at her eighteenth-birthday party. Dickins’s separate recollection describes seeing her the following week. These details should not be treated as the same event.
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Did Myspace make Adele’s discovery possible?
The interviews support the conclusion that Myspace helped expose Adele’s music to people in the record business and formed part of the route to her XL deal. They do not establish that she would never have been noticed without it. Retrospective accounts describe what happened, not what would have happened under a different set of circumstances.
Sony Music says Adele signed with XL that year and identifies 19 as her debut album. The record deal followed the chain of upload, attention, referrals, meetings, and live performance; the evidence does not isolate one link as the sole cause.
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What the accounts establish
- Adele said a friend uploaded her music to Myspace without her knowledge.
- She said record-company inquiries followed, and XL contacts directed her to Jonathan Dickins.
- Dickins said an XL A&R referral led him to listen to Adele’s Myspace songs.
- He also recalled meeting her and seeing her perform in person.
- The sources describe Myspace as an important route to industry attention, not a proven necessary or exclusive cause of her discovery.
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