Music industry insiders were baffled by the rush to buy tickets for American singer John White – who has since gone on to sell out the new O2 Arena for a record 14 nights.

They hired market research company, Phil’s Market Research, to look into the phenomenon and the results showed that 99% of people had never heard of White, the other 1% wanted to make it quite clear that not only had they not heard of him they didn’t know anybody who had either.

'John Who?', says public but tickets go like hot cakes

Yet the sold-out shows in Dublin remain a mystery. Who bought the tickets? Some suggest a record company scam in which they have purchased all the tickets to create demand for an artist, harking back to the olden days when they used to rig the charts on a regular basis. Critics have said that unless White pulls out of the shows at the last minute due to ‘unforseen circumstances’ which are completely ‘beyond the control’ of the promoters then the empty arena when he performs will blow the whole deal.

Not everyone agrees though. Dick Flat of Hot Press thinks just the opposite is true. “If nobody’s heard of him then nobody’s going to go to the gigs. And if nobody goes to the gigs then there’s nobody to see if there’s nobody else there. Therefore he could play all 14 nights singing to himself and nobody would be any the wiser because nobody’s going to see somebody they’ve never heard of. I mean, if you’ve never heard of him you wouldn’t even know the show was on”.

Even all the press fanfare about the shows selling out has failed to raise White’s profile with further research showing people have never even heard one of his songs without knowing it was him. This has led to wide-spread speculation on internet forums and message boards that John White does not actually exist at all and is simply a figment of our collective imagination.

“How else can you explain it?”, said one poster to popular Irish Times blogger Tim O’Carroll. “Reality is merely a concept and simply vocalising something makes it real. Did Bilbo Baggins exist until JRR Tolkein gave him life through his pen? The same applies for John White. He lives simply because we expect him to, in a very abstract sense. It’s really quite brilliant when you think about it”.

What is remarkable is the fact that even after writing this article I have never heard of John White. Yet I have two tickets for his show on March 12th.

How did this happen?