Vance Joy

Australian Vance Joy (real name James Keogh) released the EP God Loves You When You’re Dancing in 2013 and saw success with the single “Riptide,” which has nearly 45 million views on YouTube.

By the time South By Southwest rolled around that year, Paradigm President Marty Diamond told Pollstar there was a whole team at the agency in hot pursuit of Joy.

“It was a collective effort between Jon Adelman, Larry Webman, Ashley [Mowry-Lewis] and I to do this,” he said.

After signing the artist, tours with Young The Giant and Tom Odell, festival dates and radio shows were arranged, and another big push came after the release of Joy’s Dream Your Life Away in September 2014, and the single, “Mess Is Mine.”

“He writes incredibly effective and emotional songs, but we didn’t want to fall into the trap of getting stuck there,” Diamond said. “It was really about being captured as an alternative artist as opposed to a singer-songwriter. Management, label and the agency all worked in lockstep to see that accomplished.”

And if there were ever doubts about Joy being pigeonholed, Taylor Swift’s selection of the artist to open her upcoming tour likely put those thoughts to rest.

“She approached us,” Diamond said. “We were kind of in a really good place in terms of the timing of our story and her picking support. Sometimes the dots line up.”

Joy will open the North American leg of Swift’s tour May through October with side-trips to festivals like Coachella.

“‘Riptide’ has been a success across multiple formats,” Diamond said. “Our last tour was a sold-out success with multiple dates that were upgraded. But also, ‘Mess Is Mine’ is certainly going down that path. When you look at the festivals, we can’t ask for a situation to evolve better in terms of an artist-development story.”

At press time, Joy was repped by several agencies including The Agency Group for Canada, ITB for the U.K. And Village Sounds for Australia.