The 'silver lining' for Dupré

What happened

The musical career of aspiring singer Ashley Alexandra Dupré took off this week the minute she was identified as New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s call-girl. A Web site called Amie Street that sells downloads of Dupré’s songs saw a surge of traffic on Thursday and Friday, with more than 295,000 views of her bio page (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) and more than 2 million paid downloads of her songs “What We Want” and “Move Ya Body.” (Radar Online)

What the commentators said

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“Hello, silver lining!” said David Segal in The Washington Post (free registration). “No, a record deal isn't a sure thing. But look at it this way: She had no chance on Tuesday, before anyone knew her name, and she has a slender chance now that more than 2.3 million people have visited http://www.myspace.com/ninavenetta and heard her songs.” Any aspiring artist will tell you the hardest part of making it big is “getting noticed.”

“The reviews are in,” said Kate Stroup and Tiffany McGee in People.com, “and Ashley Alexandra Dupré may just have a future in music.” Her songs are already getting air time on New York radio stations. And critics say it’s “not great -- but no worse than a lot of pop music already out there.”

Dupré’s music has already rocketed from free to Amie Street’s top price of 98 cents per download, said Billboard’s Mariel Concepcion and Hillary Crosley via Reuters, and some top talent scouts think she could be headed for stardom. Others think she’s going nowhere. The only thing certain is that the publicity surrounding Spitzer’s downfall has given her a unique shot at fame.

“For this aspiring 22-year-old musician, the best career move she ever made was hopping on a train to Washington D.C.” to become “Spitzer’s squeeze” for a day, said Lisa Johnson Mandell in the FilmStew blog. Now she has to “weed” through the offers pouring in from publishers and studios. Dupré told The New York Times she didn’t want people to think she was a “monster,” but she needn’t have worried. “Agents and managers on both coasts see her as nothing less than a gleaming cash machine.”