Member Since: 8/13/2012
Posts: 25,749
|
Quote:
|
Halsey is not Michael Jackson. But she is a test case in the new race to anoint, this time by another sacred gatekeeper. MTV’s power is no more, but as Apple Music begins to strengthen its grip — 11 million users in six weeks and growing — it is using its in-house bullhorn to reinvent models of icon ownership. According to a monthlong study conducted by Quartz, Halsey’s “New Americana” was the second-most-played song on the streaming service’s Beats 1 radio station. Have you heard “New Americana”? If you’re not an Apple Music allegiant, you may not have. “New Americana” has never charted on Billboard’s Hot 100. It has never appeared on rival Spotify’s Top 50 chart. At the time of the study, it had fewer than 1 million plays on YouTube. With its “Biggie and Nirvana”–boosting hook, the song is a rallying cry for a generation that can’t always hear its own frequency. And yet “New Americana” dominates Beats 1.
|
What the **** at this EXPOSÉ 
Is there a thread?
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prosp...r-you-can-own/
Quote:
|
Halsey is not not-famous — as Coscarelli points out, she has more than 500,000 Twitter followers, and more on Instagram. But it behooves Lowe and Beats 1 and Apple Music to affirm the 20-year-old singer-songwriter’s iconhood in specific, monetizable ways. For Apple Music to anoint a young star is to create a mutual relationship, a culture of debt, and a new class of pop star. Halsey’s life can be reduced to a perfect millennial construct — beautiful, bisexual, gifted, self-styled, outspoken, and web-consonant. She looks like what Apple wants you to hear. Her record label is Astralwerks, a Universal-owned subsidiary that has been a home to artists like Hot Chip, Phoenix, and Bat for Lashes — uncategorizable outsiders working to success within a major-label-funded incubator. Halsey’s music is also genre-defiant — “New Americana” is a kind of Lorde-lite anthem, but the songs on her album, Badlands (out this Friday), are dissonant, chilly electro-pop, sung heartily. They soar, and then they despair. Like Beats 1 — and unlike the early days of MTV — Halsey doesn’t have a format to serve.
|
|
|
|
|
.
