Archive for May, 2010

2009-07-23 20.03.09.jpg, originally uploaded by bradley23.

Running a live demo for a client yesterday, we noticed that Michael Jackson though deceased was still alive in the hearts and searches of music fans around the world.

In fact he was kicking musical butt in terms of interest levels, still the king of pop. This was originally posted over at my personal blog.

We all have some things in our media consumption that are the informational equivalent of the perfect bacon sandwich (in my case: thick-cut processed white bread, smoked bacon grilled until it will shatter like glass and Chef brown sauce.) Here’s mine:

• Vice magazine Dos and Don’ts - Dos and Don’ts is kind of like sitting in a pavement cafe and doing people watching with a couple of good friends with a caustic sense of humour. A combination of snappy copywriting, great street style-book pictures versus Walcreature shots make this must-click viewing
• Ransack Your Dignity - when Popbitch, Holy Moly and People of Walmart don’t give me a a sufficient dose of schadenfreude Ransack Your Dignity usually hits the spot. An online pictorial scrap book of Broken Britain, the misadventures of the unfortunate people featured never fails to cheer me up
• RCRD LBL - back in the day when I used to DJ on a regular basis in Liverpool promotion agencies used to send me records, in return I would fax back my opinion and a list of tracks in my current playlist (which I would also submit to Mixmag | DMC). I got some great records out of it, but the one that sticks in my mind is the worst record I ever received; Italian techno remixes of Musical Youth’s Pass the Dutchie by Walter Cremonini put out by MCA through DMC to DJs. I wasn’t that tactful in my return sheet and the amount of vinyl I got from them moving forward diminished considerably. Overall, it was a good deal, I got to meet some handy people, do a bit of A&R work for an Italian record label and produce an unreleased track in an afternoon with a producer then on the roster of Loaded Records. RCRD LBL doesn’t give you much scope for real world adventures but does give you new music for free similar to a promo agency but without the filling out forms etc, so you can to can enjoy the lucky dip experience of new music
• JNKsystem - A Japanese-authored photo blog which happens to blog about street style, I particularly like the bit of randomness in the curation of the blog. Its not as focused as Swaggerdap or Format, but that’s part of its charm
• Rhett & Link’s video blog - Rhett and Link are a creative duo who put together some great comedy and do some interesting advertising creative work as well. They are also responsible for I love local commercials - I managed to discover the credit mack daddy through their site

What’s your media indulgences?

This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

We are so used to manufactured pop music artists by the likes of Tom Watkins, Stock | Aitken | Waterman and more recently Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. Some of these groups like Wham, Kylie Minogue and Take That had international success. We have gotten used to the dominance of western international recording artists.

Wonder Girls Korean fan site.

It is this heritage that makes the Wonder Girls phenomena: a Korean girl-band managed by a Korean team getting a Billboard top 100 hit all the more remarkable.

Wonder Girls MySpace page

That kind of success takes more than talent and good looks - the world music industry is littered with talented beautiful failures. The Wonder Girls are creatures of the internet age, they started off conventionally enough in South Korea and then used their South Korean fan base to spring board into the US marketplace.

There were two parts in this story which made a great use of social media:

• Live web chats and Where in the world are the Wonder Girls videos provided Korean and western fans with a regular update on their activities. This allowed the Wonder Girls to spend time building a new fan base in the US through touring without neglecting their Korean fan base
• Crowdsourcing fan calls-to-action: They encouraged Korean fans to sign up to western social networks MySpace and Facebook to provide a body of ‘friends’ and help build an online bridgehead into the US. (The Korean fan network is the Daum portal). Later when they became successful they encouraged Korean and western fans to request their track Nobody via Radio Disney’s website

You could argue that Wonder Girls are a part of the ongoing Korean Wave: a rise in popularity of Korean television and film culture which has swept Asia and started to gain popularity in the west like the Japanese film, manga and anime industries before it.

Wonder Girls Facebook page

However where the Wonder Girls breaks rank with the Korean Wave is in the proactive targeted nature of their marketing; which is more reminiscent of aggression and entrepreneurship of the Japanese car, camera and consumer electronics industries which shook things up in the 1960s and 1970s. Cross-posted from my personal blog. Here’s the video for my favourite track they’ve done ‘Nobody’, it has really high production values (watch out for the James Brown homage).