Following the footsteps of Tay Zonday and Reh Dogg, Argentinian ad company Santo knows the secret to getting viral attention in the new Diggocracy: Black dudes being hilariously emo! Their new spot for Argentinian music download site Personal Musica (that’s Spanish for the French colloquialism musique personnelle) features a “gangsta” (assuredly their words, not ours) frolicking on the beach and singing along to Ricky Martin. At first it looked like yet another entry in the Stuff White People Forward entry for “YouTubes of black people not acting according to stereotypes,” but underneath the dopey exterior, the company’s ad campaign actually makes a pretty good statement about the way we should discover music. Really!
So yeah, after you get past the dude in 1987-era dookie ropes riding a horse and playing a piano in the sand, you get this tag line: “Mr. Gangsta, we know there’s one Ricky Martin song you dig. Buy it from your phone at the Personal Music Store.” Another ad for the comapny has a bunch of tubby metalheads blorping around in headset mics to Britney Spears:
If I was the type of person to make a living writing insufferable think pieces out of 30-second ads I saw on the Internet, I would say that yes, this ad is actually an optimistic take on how people should be discovering music online. Let’s look past the fact that the ads still latch on to the idea of “guilty pleasures,” a way of thinking about music that many Idolator commenters (and Fall Out Boy-loving editors) vehemently see as outdated. The ads say that, indeed, it’s more important and rewarding to spend time and money searching out music you like in other genres. The Internet has made it so easy to find out only about your genre of choice–allowing you to spend all day only on rap blogs or only on metal blogs–that many of us have friends who don’t even know what the fuck a Lady Gaga is.
Personal Musica is basing its business model on the hopes that people will use the internet for the noble cause of learning and discovering–hell, maybe even understanding–other music. So… this is probably the last time you’ll ever hear about it. Have fun refreshing the same blog all day, everyone!
Personal Music: Ricky [Creativity]
Thanks to you I know who Lady Gaga is. Not that this has improved my life any. Mostly I know now that it’s her when I hear her over the speakers in the Finish Line when I’m buying shoes, and that she likes to go out in public with no pants.
Thanks to you I know who Micachu is. That has improved my life, for reals.
I think we all think we’re broad-minded when it comes to music, but that has its limits — what with amateur and semi-pros releasing a ton of sometimes worthy music free (check out archive.org sometime), the commersh labels, the underground labels, and OMFG Boomkat Digital, there aren’t enough hours left in THE REST OF YOUR LIFE to even scratch the surface.
And I’ve already replaced my $150/month CD habit from the last century with a $150/month mp3 habit. That still amounts to buying more music than I can actually listen to with any depth. Not to mention my endless paranoia about backing up my ITunes library 7 ways from Sunday.