I never really bothered with Halsey before (I’m old, this blog is old. This is a self-hosted blog.), but her sampling of Britney’s Lucky was really well done, and the music video directed by Gia Coppola took it home. It pains me to read whether Britney gave her consent for the sample, but then felt the music video somehow violated some unspoken deal, but then took it all back and called it fake news. The whole project made me nostalgic and blue.
I often think (a lot lately) about how audiences (and now fervent fandoms) literally live off and suck the life out of our supposed favorite stars. Tear them to pieces while they’re up on the spotlight and kick them when they’re down, only to regret having forgotten them in time when they’re gone. Whichever the way— tragic death or slow and lonely. “I wonder what happened to them?“
It’s sad that she seems to regret making a comeback due to mean comments from her own fans, because her whole vibe has really taken me back to the late 90s early 2000s, especially in this “stripped” version of the song where she wears baggie jeans and hot pink glasses. The colored glasses really really took me back in time.
Thank you for this beautiful, yet sad, homage to pop stars.
Having debuted back in 2022 under the name Song Soowoo (송수우) with the edgy-sounding song Love Me or Hate Me [MV], Song is back under the name NINA (니나) [almost impossible to look up without running into other Ninas] with the music video for Love Like This, directed by Jonah George.
Which, if you’ve seen the Bugs thumbnail on YouTube, looks Yu Aoi-inspired. I say Yu Aoi-inspired, because it’s mostly Yuki Tanada’s One Million Yen Girl and heavily references Shunji Iwai’s Hana & Alice for obvious shots. However, it also heavily references Iwai’s 1995 Asian hit Love Letter which has inspired a whole generation of filmmakers [1][2] and idols.
Now this is what we can call a comeback COMEBACK, not a regular Kpop Comeback. xD Years since their last album, Basic back in 2015, Brown Eyed Girls went their personal projects way— GaIn and JeA with solo music, Miryo releasing singles and participating on Unpretty Rapstar, and Narsha with varieties as well as getting married~
It’s good to have them BACK!
If you want to support Brown Eyed Girls’ RE_vive album cover compilation, you can order it at Ktown4u where it counts for Hanteo Sales. Album comes out on the 30th. YesAsia also carries the album with the poster tube, and without it.
I like mentioned back in April [1], Yu-chan is featured on Hoshikuzu Scat’s (星屑スキャット) most recent music video directed by Birds Without Names director Shiraishi Kazuya~ The song, titled Shinjuku Chanson (新宿シャンソン), is featured on Kesho-shitsu (化粧室), the first album of the drag queen group, and was written by multi-talented illustrator-actor-writer Lily Franky.
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
I think there might have been an extra coma on the YT subs, that I may have put on my screencap, but whatever.
Feelings. Feelings were had. Maybe not the song as a whole, I still think World Without Tears (沒有眼淚的世界) [LV] is much more interesting musically, but the music video for Dearest (親愛的) [MV] by Chen Hung-i (陈宏一) totally sells it. I cried so much, I’ve been crying quite easy these past couple of days. Hwasa made me cry with her short version of Lee Moon Se’s (이문세) Whistle (휘파람). Then this, and now Leehom.
Dearest, you will forever be Baba’s baby.
A kiss on your cheek, so you sleep well through the night.
Dearest, no matter how long the road,
my love will be with you because
you are forever my Dearest.
This is just hitting the right mood tonight. Discovered a couple of weeks back on the latest Xiami compilation– it’s called If I Lose my Youth (如果我失去了青春) by the band ZhaoZe (沼泽). Great thing they’re on Bandcamp too!
