STACK NZ Summer #70

THIS MONTH at

MUSIC

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DID YOUTUBE KILL THE RADIO STAR?

On the JB Stereo

Megadeth Dystopia

Sia This Is Acting

Not yet, but the rise of Charlie Puth shows how importantYouTube is.

Roy Orbison One Of The Lonely Ones

Bloc Party Hymns

Panic! At The Disco Death Of A Bachelor

Charlie Puth

Various Artists Relax & Unwind: Summer

And as Ed Sheeran – another who made his name on platforms such asYouTube – pointed out in an interview a few years back, ultimately social media is still just a marketing tool. “The thing people have confused about me is they think I became successful because of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook,’ he says. ‘They are tools that help, 100 per cent, andYouTube is a brilliant way to get yourself out there. There are definitely ways to use the internet. But to rely on it is not a good idea.” JB Listener

I t only seems like yesterday when MySpace was the coolest new website around, an online platform that provided new artists like Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen and some young teenager called Adele their first taste of stardom. MySpace has long been surpassed by YouTube as a place for unknowns to reach a potentially a huge global audience, but as a platform for creating new music star, it has never been more powerful. Charlie Puth is the latest pop sensation to make the leap into the mainstream viaYouTube. He first came to attention in 2011 when he and a friend’s cover of Adele’s Someone LikeYou went viral and caught the attention of Ellen DeGeneres. He went on to appear on her show twice and watched his international fan base grow both on and offline. “It got me in front of 30 million people,” he says of the experience. “It pushed me into a different area I never thought I would reach.” And his career went into overdrive when he teamed up last year withWiz Khalifa for the ballad SeeYou Again , which played out over the final scene in Fast & Furious 7 . The video of the song, which spent eight weeks at #1 here, has racked up more than 1.3 billion views onYouTube to date. This month, Puth releases his debut album Nine Track Mind and he looks well-placed to translate his online success to records, if only for the fact that he is already established as a songwriter, having wrote and produced material for artists such as Lil Wayne, Jason Derulo, StevieWonder, MeghanTrainor, Trey Songz, and Fergie. A well-sung, catchy bedroom cover is always going to create a bit of an online buzz but when it comes records, most pop stars need original material.

Hinds Leave Me Alone

MUSIC

Aoife O’Donovan In The Magic Hour

Various Artists The Hateful Eight OST

David Bowie Blackstar

Ed Sheeran

Photo: Ben Watts

SUMMER EDITION 2016

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