You know I’ve been loving Celeb Five‘s variety outing this year. Their Weekly Idol episode has probably extended my life an extra month. My Durian and Jujube face idols~
ANYWAY~ probably because of it, the YouTube algorithm gave me this clip of Lee Hyori performing Bad Girls at the 2013 Mnet 20’s Choice Awards which also features Ahn Young-mi, who -after making her Celeb Five mates do sexy dances – has become my favorite. lol
First of all, this arrangement for Bad Girls make it so much easier to figure out the patch from Monochrome to Black. Also, the performance. Also, Hyori. Blessed. I remember I was so mesmerized with Hyori during this era, I still remember the Comeback Showcase she did fondly. I’m almost mad Hyori went to Jeju to live her hippie life xD lol But bless her.
So… I’m going to the upcoming Super Junior concert xD
You know Peru was like, the Kpop Latin American capital back in 2011-2012 when the Big Bang concert happened here. The only Latin American place coz Big Bang was/is huge. SM fans are huge too, but… our concert bubble exploded, our concert infrastructure is crap, so we’ve missed out on a lot of things. Like a lot of big events that I heard were gonna happened, never got to happen.
Last year I just dove deep into my Kpop nostalgia, Mamamoo has drowned me in Kpop and all Korean things, so I followed a lot of Korean variety and groups, and I ended up thinking that SM released two really good albums for SNSD and Super Junior, which also happened to go great back to back. For those who know me, I have a grip with most Kpop albums because I only tend to like the title track (or just one song in the album). Well, in the case of Holiday Night and Black Suit, they’re solid albums with a pace and a feel. That’s a rare occurrence.
I had never really followed Super Junior, it’s only been lately that I learned a couple of their names aside from Leeteuk and Siwon. xD Sorry, Sorry is the only song I can sing to, but lol I did get to see their Weekly Idol appearance and I died looking at Donghae with his platinum blond hair. xD And then he started showing his weepy emotional side, and I was gone. LOL
I’ve been trying to fix my Current Flavors’ age, and I can sense my average age going down.
Well, that was an exciting early morning. I got really hyped 10min. before the pre-orders for Moosical Bluray started because I wasn’t sure I was gonna get a copy, after what people went through while getting Solar’s Emotion. But everything went well, and then I was attacked by Paint Me (칠해줘).
I, obviously, have all the feels. The song DOES get better with replays. It did sound very West power pop ballad to me, which is explained by the fact that the song was composed by Mich Hansen, Peter Wallevik, Daniel Davidsen, Chelcee Grimes, and Kara DioGuardi, who happened to have worked in Christina Aguilera’s Back to Basics, which I loved. What really sold me the song are the lyrics, though. Written by JYP’s Jowul (조울), the structure of the song is telling the story of lovers— the beginning of love, the happiness of being in a relationship, the passion, and the heartbreak, with an abrupt ending that works thematically. It’s also a freaking sexy song, so I won’t lie that I wasn’t thinking that my favorite Kpop MV director, Hwang Soo-ah, should’ve done it. LOL
The song really called for a MV with storyline, but I know Mamamoo’s strengths aren’t on acting (‘Be Normal’ xD) and I also understand that Mamamoo aren’t in the position of not showing their face on their MV yet. But I imagined a very intimate MV with actors xD
I’m really looking forward to what they do in the album, even though I’m not looking forward to Sleep in the Car (잠이라도 자지) [1] AND Paint Me being in the same album [see: making albums].
Having said that— the promo photos. Whee-in, you bias wrecker, you. So I finally decided to put together my favorite era looks for each member ^^ Continue Reading…
There was a time, a long time ago, when I really took to streaming music. My music buying habits, but specially my music download habits, changed to basically streaming to the point when licensing and catalogs began changing, and I found my music collection shrinking. In the end, I started downloading once again.
I have come to the realization that I buy less and less physical albums, or it takes me longer to buy them. :(
As I found myself deeper and deeper into Kpop fandom once again, so deep into Mamamoo fandom that I begun to get irked by fans who publicly post about their illegal downloads AND complain about numbers of comebacks/group activities. I ended up writing this nonchalant post about music earnings, as well as other Mamamoo activities fans can support besides comebacks [1][2][3]. Yes, I’ve become that type of fan. The old one. LOL
As a grown-up who loves the arts, I always try to remind people that if they love and support their artists that they should buy instead of stream because streaming doesn’t pay. I was literally shook when Hyori mentioned that she had learned that PSY’s Gangnam Style only made $38k [1]; even though I knew some of the horror stories like the one of musician Lee Lang (이랑) who, during her acceptance speech for winning Best Folk Song at the Korean Music Awards, stated that she had only made $370 USD in total earnings on the month of January, so she decided to auction her award starting from the base price of her rent [1].
You can support Lee Lang by buying her album, Playing God (신의 놀이), on Bandcamp :)
And to my surprise, one of my favorite groups this year~~~ the lovely girls from Bolbbalgan4, who are considered digital monsters with their songs almost always charting within the Top10 of Melon, South Korea’s most used music site, had made only $61k USD by August this year [1]. Red Diary Page.1 didn’t drop until a month later, and all 5 songs in the album charted within the Top15. But that’s still besides the point. The point being that your faves don’t make money because you stream music on YouTube or Apple Music or Spotify.
So stop demanding expensive music videos that can cost from $100k-$500k for an average medium size budget, or go up to $1M for the splashy ones that we don’t often see nowadays. At the height of the music video era in the 90s, Michael Jackson and Madonna’s most expensive videos hovered the $5M budget without adjustments for inflation [1]. Stop demanding multiple comebacks a year with infinite number of physical prints (these cost production budgets AND storage budget for large stocks) that you will be waiting for price drops and re-sellers.
So now, let’s do some math~
Let’s say a physical album, a regular jewel case priced at -let’s say- $10 USD. According to prices in 2017— Apple takes a 30% cut [1], Bandcamp takes a 15% cut for digital sales and a 10% for merch [1], whereas CD baby takes a 9% cut off digital sales and $4 USD off physical sales [1]. That means that by selling a $14USD album, the independent artist makes $10USD. In the parallel universe in which your fave is an independent, they keep $7 of those $10 in iTunes, but if there’s a label, the artist (meaning singer) probably gets $1 of those $10. If they’re their own lyricist, musician, producer or sound engineer, fees are different.
Streaming is a whole different beast— according to this post on Digital Music News from 2016, to make a single dollar $1 in Tidal, Google Play, Apple Music and Deezer; you gotta play the song +180 times. 196, to be exact, for Apple Music and Deezer. Make that 279 times on Spotify, 483 times on Vevo, 766 times on Soundcloud, and… at the end of the list, YouTube, where you gotta play songs 776 times to make that one dollar. That means a song/music video that has 100 million views on its YouTube official channel, has made roughly $125k USD, which would be made by selling 12.5k physical albums on CD Baby.
So remember, the next time you complain about X official store prices or limited stocks, it’s because all adds up to the price. If you found a cheap album, it’s because someone along the way lost money.
Yes, I’m low-key talking about Bizent LOL I’ve compared prices with YesAsia, and since I don’t get YesAsia free shipping, that’s paying double shipping because the YA price includes the Bizent $20 shipping fee. I’d rather that money go directly to Mamamoo. xD
A moomoo, I don’t know if it’s 붕붕 (with this current twitter handle, amoo0619), released all the remixes they had done with Mamamoo soundbites after Moonbyul had asked about the Hwasa x Ghost soundbite from their MMMTV; and it’s hilarious – especially if you know where the soundbite comes from xD.
So, of course, I added it to my library.
xD Hardcore moomoo now, na?
Also~~~ is anybody else smelling of low-key comeback? Whee-in was just asking for a Hwasa Lion soundbite. What if… they release a troll album O_O with Sleeping in the Car as lead single xD
I just wanted to drop a note thanking Solar for releasing Solar Gamsung on tape (yes, I was one of the lucky ones to get it on first order), because that pushed me to clean up the cassette deck I had at home (yes, I’m the old person who still has a cassette player on hand).
Honestly, I thought my deck was busted, I remember testing it a while back and it stopped working. Today, I cleaned it up with alcohol; and though the automatic open/close is faulty as heck and the rewind/fwd doesn’t always work, it plays stuff. And today I listened to my dad’s voice in years. So thank you, Solar-ssi, for making me cry tonight.
My dad used to have a Karaoke bar in the 90s, and ever the music fan and Karaoke-owner, he liked to sing and record himself singing. LOL So now I have 42min. of him singing an array of 14 songs. He was, obviously, a very VERY big Miguel Bose fan. Though, honestly, I had never heard my dad singing (the Spanish version of) I Will Follow You xD Now I’ve finally transferred his tapes on mp3 to keep :) added him to my iTunes library, album cover and all~
Los Doltons’ version of El Ultimo Beso will always be a good memory of him.
