He’s a singer-songwriter named Barry Louis Polisar. He is a very, very nice guy. More to the point, he’s a great example of someone who doesn’t wait for the world to give him a lucky break in the clichéd “I’m going to be a rock-star someday” style. Instead, he shows up for every gig on time, he tracks down every lead. He self-publishes. He performs at schools and libraries all the way from his hometown (near Washington, DC) to Fairbanks, Alaska. He really, truly, keeps himself open for opportunity to come his way. And it does.

Now, after a lot of years in the business he is suddenly, and on an impressive scale (the Juno soundtrack has sold 600,000 copies in the first 3 months alone) truly an “overnight” success. I call his story:

Here’s how it happened:

Barry manufactured several CD titles in the Micah-running-things-out-of-his-basement days of Oasis. For each title he qualified, like all Oasis clients, for our Tools of Promotion program: radio broadcast promotion, Retail-Store (Brick & Mortar) distribution, and more. But he was such an early client of Oasis, we hadn’t added the iTunes/online component of the program yet.

When we did, and he heard about it, he sent us a nice note asking if he could get certificates for all his titles retroactively — the hand-embossed pieces of paper that, back then, we would have required to get into the online part of our program.

Now a lot of people would just chalk their timing up to bad luck, and assume a company, even Oasis, would leave them in the lurch. But because Barry had faith and wrote us such a nice note, I went to the mailroom (AKA, my living room), got out the embosser, and hand-made five certificates for Barry and put them in the mail.

Fast-forward 7 years... Jason Reitman, the director of the movie Juno, is trolling through iTunes, where Barry is featured, thanks to those retroactive Oasis Tools of Promotion certificates. Reitman mis-types the title of a song he thinks he wants for the film and hears Barry’s song instead.

He emails Barry and asks if he can use it for the film. One hit movie, 600,000 soundtrack copies, and a flood of worldwide licensing requests later, and there’s your happy ending to this very nifty story.