Ruben Garay is the boy/man genius behind one of the more popular Internet websites ever and easily the most popular of countless Britney Spears fan sights, WorldofBritney. Garay, who is Swedish, currently lives in the States (with his girlfriend) though considers Sweden his home base. He was good enough to answer some questions for us.
Brachman.com: You have a great site and it’s no secret, since WorldofBritney has won numerous awards. How did you get the idea to start a Britney website, and how did you become a Web master – are you self-taught?
Ruben Garay: Just like millions of other fans, I started liking Britney from the beginning, when she burst onto the scene. In the latter stages of my teenage years I needed someone to look up to, and there was Britney. I found her to be unique in every way. When her debut album came out in early 1999 I spent about a year being a typical Britney fan, buying her CD, having her posters on my wall, and listening to her album every morning before going to school. I decided I needed to see her in person, so I saved up everything and flew from Sweden to Tampa Bay, Florida with a scalped, eighth-row ticket from Ebay in my pocket. I was 17.I thought the show was amazing; the entire trip was a great adventure. When I got home I felt so strongly about how talented Britney is and what she represents, even more than I did before, that I wanted to show everybody. So I began designing World of Britney from scratch and yes, I am mainly self-taught.My parents are divorced so the family was on a very limited budget. I maintained the site the first six months on a Pentium 100 Mhz with 16 MB of RAM. I worked very hard, starting in the summer of 2000, learning graphics applications and HTML applications. Let me tell you, it was awfully tough to get from there to here. Constant work, but I’m not complaining.
Brachman.com: What is it about Britney that made her a star and, despite having career “ups” and “downs,” makes her continue to appeal to millions of people around the world?
Ruben: Whenever a new artist comes along, he or she is usually judged on two things –music and appearance/appeal. Britney had something else – she was the first of a group of singers who started very young and came out of the entertainment industry as established professionals. You could say they had a professional “life” going, an image that included an already proven talent. Britney was first, then came Christina, Mandy, Jessica, and the list continues to grow. The world had not seen yet an empowering female teenager with a dream to inspire others. Britney’s fans were able to connect with her in a unique way due to the fact that despite her success, she had somewhat humble roots and was proud of them.I’m talking about the part of Britney that always seems so down to earth. She would always be modest, kind, polite and giving, even though she was world famous and earning millions. When she met with fans, she would still greet their mothers with “ma’am” and their fathers with “sir.”No wonder millions of teenagers with no hope and no consolation found everything about Britney comforting.
Brachman.com: Are you as big a Britney fan today as you were when you started?
Ruben: I think my Britney "fandom" has gone through stages. I of course started out just like any other fan. As I say, pretty much like anyone else at the beginning, liking a performer, or, I don’t know, a movie actor or actress. People sit in a movie theatre watching their favorite actor or actress. There’s something going on, there’s an image, an attitude, something the actor represents that the people in the audience like, connect with, whatever you want to call it. So when the next movie comes along, these audience members will be back no matter what. That’s how I was with Britney. Let me compare it this way. If you watch “Saturday Night Live” on television, you see what fits the screen. If you like the show, you enjoy the show as produced, as it’s meant for viewers to be seen.However, if you attend a taping of the program – if you’re sitting in the audience – you see things the TV never shows, such as characters waiting to get into the TV box space, a glimpse of who’s smoking off stage, someone having an argument with a co-worker when the two of them are about to go on camera and do a love scene.If you’ve seen all of that, then the next time you’re sitting at home watching SNL, you’ll never look at it in the same way anymore, because you were able to gain access to things the general audience doesn’t.That’s the kind of fan I am with Britney now. I still care about everything, but I’ve learned a lot about the business, and now I’m more interested in that – producing, directing, etc.
Brachman.com: Any career advice you’d care to give Britney?
Ruben: I am hardly in a position to give Britney advice since I’m not part of her management team, her family or close friends. My only advice would be just from a fan’s viewpoint, and that is for her to make sure she alone has the final word on her projects, not others. I would just say, never forget where you came from, how you started and what you mean to your fans. Keep doing what you're doing and don’t worry whether or not everyone approves, always follow your heart and your dreams.
Brachman.com: You’ve said you don’t exactly see Britney as a superstar, more like a girl you might be sitting next to in English class. Please explain.
Ruben: It's really hard for me to see her as a superstar because, even though I have great admiration for her, I’m not going to worship Britney, get carried away and live in a fantasy world that would, among other things, not allow me to see her mistakes.I have the right to "love" an artist, yet also have the right to criticize or simply disagree with something I don’t care for, just like you would with someone sitting next to you in class.
Brachman.com: Since you haven’t met Britney, if you got the call and the two of you went out for coffee, what would the conversation be like?
Ruben: I don’t expect to meet Britney, because she’s so prominent and successful. If, let’s say, there were some kind of opportunity to meet her with a group of, I don’t know, 20 other fans, I would decline it.This addresses the point we talked about earlier. I’m more interested in behind-the-scenes things now. If Britney contacted me and said, “Look, I really appreciate all you’ve done, let’s chat,” that would be one thing. That would be something.If it somehow happened and we did go out for coffee, I’d be looking at her, realizing the moment I never thought was possible had arrived, that she’s real, there’s just one, and she’s right in front of me. I think I’d begin with trying to thank her for inspiring me and shaping my life in so many ways, and she would probably be very polite and not let on that she had no idea what I was talking about, but that’s okay, that’s how it works – artists never fully understand what they do for the rest of us.After getting that over with I’d probably just talk to her about life in general, things we have in common and the things we don’t.
Brachman.com: At one time there was a misunderstanding between WorldofBritney and Britney’s management team. Can you tell us what happened?
Misunderstanding is somewhat right. I once wrote a judgmental article on my site about the practices of Jive Records [Britney’s label] and how I disagreed with the way they were carrying on their business with Britney. I got an awful lot of responses, yet one of the E-mails I received was from a girl who was in direct contact with the head of New Media, the division of Jive Records that handles Britney's promotion online and offline, basically the one guy who was in charge of Britney.com and Britney's marketing.This girl put me in touch with this man; we started exchanging E-mails and he gave me insight into what it's like to run things for Britney. There were so many things that I was so ignorant about -- legal issues, copyright issues, royalties, how a simple posting of a video could damage business and so on.As I’ve indicated, I started my site as a fan, so these issues were all new to me. Anyway, the outcome of these discussions was that some time in the future, WorldofBritney.com would join forces with Britney.com [Britney’s official site] so that WorldofBritney would be controlling a new section they were going to introduce called the "Fan Area".After waiting months for this to happen, this man told me that he felt I still didn’t understand all the rules of the music industry because I was posting "illegal material" which to me was "promotion material."There’s a learning curve on these matters, they are complex, there are lots of different ways to look at things, and it’s not like I could just call them up at any time and say, “What do you think of this?”So then I’m informed that the collaboration is off. Let me tell you, one of the goals of an unofficial site is to collaborate with an official site. It had looked like it was going to happen, so I was very disappointed when it didn’t. I was very disappointed.On top of that, I was getting warnings of lawsuits by major corporations for "substantially damaging" their marketing strategies and for "creating confusion." This was also at a time when I felt Britney was becoming poisoned, if you will, by what I thought was excessive corporate interference in her career.It was as if she was becoming what other people wanted her to be, rather than what she wanted. I thought she was becoming too trusting of some people who I thought were more interested in their own careers than what was best for Britney.One element of this new direction she seemed to be taking was the elimination of “meet and greets,” she stopped signing autographs and many of her fans, including this one, felt abandoned.So I decided to shut down my website and speak my mind. I wrote a 5,000-word essay as a goodbye letter, which was picked up by news agencies stretching from Los Angeles to Sydney, including radio stations and TV channels. I decided to leave the Britney scene and take a vacation. I went to Los Angeles, yet I was still receiving calls to my hotel room from national radio stations in Europe wanting to interview me.After my goodbye letter had reached a ton of people through syndication in the international media, including MTV, somebody within Britney's management team decided to release a press statement in time for Britney's "CrossRoads" visit to Sweden that I had apparently threatened her and that was going to do something to her.It was absurd -- a planted rumor so that the issues I raised could be ignorned, and that I could be dismissed, as in, "Oh, he was just being another lunatic fan who became her number one stalker." Obviously that wasn't the case. Furthermore, I was nine time zones away in California, not in Sweden, so what could I do? Whoever put out the rumor didn't even know my whereabouts, or that my home is in the southern tip of Sweden, 600 miles from Stockholm, where Britney was going.I got a call at two in the morning on my cell phone from a leading newspaper in Sweden while I was sleeping in San Diego, California, telling me the front page of another big Swedish newspaper had come out with the headline: "Britney Threatened by Swede" -- I couldn't believe it.Now I’m convinced that record companies are so huge, so powerful and have so much money that if they wanted to make someone disappear, I mean, really wanted to, they could do it.I could have filed a lawsuit, but I didn't want to get buried in ten years of paperwork, so I let the whole thing blow over. Anyway, things are always blown out of proportion by the media, and often aren’t as big or grand as they’re made out to be.It’s not that I don’t respect Britney’s management team, she’s got some brilliant people behind her who have to get at least some credit for getting her where she is today. Sometimes, however, you have to question the methods.When I wrote my complaint, I received over 4,000 E-mails, and 95% of them were supportive. The ongoing theme was that they had the same feelings I had for some time. Then, three months later, after giving it a lot more thought, I decided to put the site back up – because the fans never stopped telling me how much they miss the site, how much they enjoyed it, that it had become part of their daily routines, etc.Obviously the site is still all about Britney, but I’m more focused on the fans now, World of Britney is a community of fans.
Brachman.com: Care to give us your view of the Britney/Justin feud, and wouldn’t it be easier if Britney simply made public her side of the story?
Ruben: Britney will never give her side of the story because that’s not her personality. Britney's still a very shy and vulnerable person inside, that’s my opinion, anyway. It has to be awfully difficult when everything you say and do, every thought you have, gets printed, twisted around, or in some way taken advantage of.How can she come out and tell the truth about something as private as a romantic relationship, when she was brought up and educated with the ideals that love is one of life’s most sacred and beautiful things and that it can lead to life’s most sacred thing, marriage? She would never be able to speak out publicly about what happened, it's just not in her nature, at least that is my impression of her. And besides, there are only two people who know what happened, Britney and Justin, and they obviously have very different opinions so we’re never going to know.Saying all that, I’ll tell you what I heard and I will emphasize that in no way should it be considered factual, it’s just what I’ve heard, and that is that Britney had been with someone long before Justin broke up with her, it was a hidden, and it was off and on for about six months.Even though Britney and Justin loved each other to death, it got to the point where the demands of their careers and the fact that they could not be together much made them fight, and I mean a lot.I think it reached the point at which Britney decided to go and seek comfort with, you might say, the next person in line, someone who had been close to her throughout her career.Justin later found out what happened and broke things off, and for Justin, what hurt the most wasn’t what had happened, but that here had been lies and dishonesty. He learned about it from someone else.My guess is that they still love each other – how can they not, they were each other’s fist love, but things happen and we’re all human.
Brachman.com: With Britney in between projects, what music are you listening to these days?
Ruben: It fluctuates. Sometimes I might sit down and listen to Metallica, Bon Jovi, REM, Cat Stevens, while other days I might go for classical and movie music themes. But hey, Britney is still at the top, man !!
Brachman.com: You’ve written that you plan to host the site for as long as it’s fun. Do you see yourself eventually launching additional websites or working in other areas of the Internet?
Ruben: Good guess. Right now, WoB is still the main thing, but I’m about to expand and launch a teen entertainment and music network, where I will offer free hosting to other entertainment sites just like mine. I am also developing an American Idol 2 website, which will launch with the premiere of the second season and where we will have our own “American Idol” online.