Though ever clad in dirty white t-shirt and white pants, Andrew WK is a performer of many stripes. Bloody-nosed party rocker, motivational speaker, noise artist, J-pop interpreter, classical pianist and television host are just a few of his more prominent job descriptions.

But is Andrew WK in fact Andrew WK?

The question of WK's identity -- and that of the producer behind his first album, I Get Wet, a person or entity credited only as "Steev Mike" -- came up again earlier this year after a spell of rumor-mill dormancy.

Since 2001, the real Andrew Wilkes-Krier has dealt with (and in some cases encouraged) allegations that his Andrew WK persona was created by a mysterious committee before his career began. Some conspiracy mongers allege that a series of actors have played the part of Andrew WK over the years. Others imply that Steev Mike is actually Dave Grohl.

Though the rumors have circulated for years, late last year interest rekindled, thanks, in part, to the resurfacing of a 2008 freeform lecture WK gave in London in which his statements about his artistic character were misconstrued. Things got so out of hand that eventually, on January 3, Andrew posted a written statement and YouTube video aimed at setting the record straight.

They didn't work. Or maybe they did.

Andrew WK is an awesomely entertaining dude. He takes the concept of performance art to a new level, remaining in the public eye as a music celebrity without having played a show with a band in years. Though his overall message is "party" and he's unafraid of questioning, he prefers mystery to clarity, equivocation to spelling it out.

He's also repeatedly indicated in interviews that there are people who were involved in planning the early stages of his career whose identities he is legally bound to keep secret (Steev Mike?). See this MTV clip for an example of one such interview.

Let's take a look at how the renewed interest in Steev Mike, along with other events and news, has played out in Andrew WK's social media numbers.

His official Facebook page saw some growth at the beginning of the year, around the time he issued those staments. Also at this time, WK gained attention for collaborating with People Under the Stairs on a remake of the Simpsons theme in honor of the final episode of the show's 20th season, which aired on January 14.

Buzz quieted a bit then increased again in late February due to a swirl of events. Probably stoking the most interest was the announcement of WK's first full-band show in five years, to be held in March in NYC, along with dates at SXSW and in Mexico. New episodes of the Cartoon Network show he hosts, Destroy Rebuild Destroy, were broadcasted, along with the news that he'd be releasing his long-anticipated "lost third album" Close Calls With Brick Walls as a double album with Mother of Mankind. In short, Andrew WK gave folks plenty to talk about.

All this seems to play out in the Facebook fan growth in early January and late February in the chart below.

The Steev Mike controversy resurfaced yet again during a town hall meeting WK held at the New York club he co-owns, Santos Party House. The February 23 Q&A was aired live on Justin.TV, where it reportedly attracted some 75,000 viewers and brought even more press attention to his so-called "identity crisis."

What got the most attention February 23 on Twitter, however, seemed to be the NYC and Mexico concert announcements.

How do we know for sure? RockDex's Twitter functionality allows us to see all the tweets mentioning the artist we're tracking on a day-by-day basis. First the stats, then a few of the tweets...

In terms of MySpace plays, pageviews and fans added, February 27 was a banner day. This is probably due to the concert-announcement buzz. (You'll notice he actually saw negative growth on town hall day, February 23, losing one fan. Awww.)

In the end, it seems that while the identity scandal was intriguing to die-hard fans, including ourselves -- we love us some W to the K -- it seems the public at large was more interested in when they'd get to see Andrew WK play "Party Hard" live again.

And by the way, we'll be partying hard when Andrew WK brings his gospel of good times to SXSW next week for a series of shows, including the Viper Room's Rooftop Riot on Friday and the Brooklyn Vegan & M for Montreal Saturday day party.

Rest assured that when Andrew WK gets on stage and the music begins pounding, there's no question that the dude is real.

It's our profound honor to announce that RockDex has been chosen as one of the five winners of the FlashFWD campaign presented by the digital music and social media-focused network SoundCtrl and by Pepsico.

We join Indaba Music, Hype Machine, Big Live and Jingle Punks in receiving this distinction. These are all excellent endeavors run by great people.

As SoundCtrl's official announcement explains, the campaign sought companies with the following qualities.

• Is in line with the SoundCtrl initiatives and mission
• Solves a problem in the industry (in other words, is it a game changing idea?)
• Fosters community
• Has reached scale or the board believes can reach scale
• Has commercial viability

For us, this is huge. Knowing that the people at SoundCtrl, as well as the community who voted for us, view us as a company that meets these criteria is deeply encouraging. We also thank the sponsors, Pepsico and Eventbrite, for supporting all the musical innovators who participated in the contest.

We'll join our fellow honorees next week in Austin at the First Annual FlashFwd SXSW event on Tuesday March 16 from 5 to 10 p.m.

Onward and upward!

The SXSW music X-plosion is two short weeks away. Soon, the streets of Austin will be teeming with indie musicians from around the world, not to mention all the bloggerazzi, publicists, A&R reps, street buskers, hipster groupies, taco trucks and the occasional lost St. Patrick's Day "normie" in his green-striped Dr. Seuss hat, bead necklace and shamrock shades wandering around wondering what the hell happened to the reality he was acquainted with as a youth listening to sports talk radio...

At RockDex we're readying ourselves for a full seven days of mayhem, from the tail end of Interactive on through the music-fest long haul. We'll be in town from Sunday, March, 14, through Sunday, March 21. To set up some face time to talk about all the exciting new enhancements we've made to our product in the past couple of months, contact Shannon at shannon@musicarsenal.com or Jimmy at jimmy@musicarsenal.com or you can even call us at 818-303-3161.

We're thrilled to be a sponsor of the Silicon Prairie Party hosted by Big Omaha on Sunday, March 14 at Lanai. Visit the Facebook event page for details.

Now, let's get on to some stats.

Despite the fact that roughly 826,983 bands play in Austin during the week of SXSW, there are always a few marquee names. They're usually some combination of hot indie bands and aging major acts that have decided to use SXSW to promote either a reunion tour or a new album. It usually works, and the buzz is often reflected in social media numbers.

We took three big bands playing SXSW, Stone Temple Pilots, the Scissor Sisters and Broken Social Scene, and ran some numbers.

In the case of STP and BSS, the SXSW announcements coincided with confirmation of a new album out later this year: May 25 and May 4, respectively. (No word yet on when the Sisters' new one is arriving, though one is reportedly in the works.)

All three bands saw boosts in online conversation and activity around their respective SXSW gig announcements. And using RockDex, we can see how much.

Stone Temple Pilots saw a February 25 peak in Twitter mentions, coinciding with a Spin listening party for the new album, plus chatter about SXSW.

The Scissor Sisters announced their SXSW gig and a two-night NYC Bowery show on the 26th, also resulting in a Twitter jump.

Fun fact: That earlier spike on February 16 reflects the 2010 Brit Awards, in which the Scissor Sisters were up for an award for "Most Memorable Brits Performance of 30 Years" for their 2005 performance of "Take Your Mama Out." (Alas, the award went to the Spice Girls)

Going over to MySpace views for Broken Social Scene, the Canadian indie stalwarts stirred up activity at the beginning of the month, when they broke news of their new album and SXSW gig.

BSS saw its biggest peak, however, when the band played a free show in Vancouver on the night of February 20. That's some gold-medal thinking (*wink*).

As RockDex shows yet again, what happens in the music biz plays out in online conversation.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, now for one bloody memorable performance.

The first time we listened to Mariachi El Bronx, we kept waiting for the cymbals to crash, the distortion to rip and the shrieks to bust through the pinata. But, as you know if you've heard the fourth album from LA punk screamers The Bronx, these guys go full Mexican start to finish.

In fact, the band is now performing as both The Bronx and as Mariachi El Bronx.

The former is the metal-tinged punk band you know and love, led by flamethrower vocalist Matt Caughthran and guitarist Joby Ford. The latter is the Three F***ing Amigos (plus two or three extras).

And amazingly, they pull it off. Listening to sweet and jaunty cuts like "Cell Mates" and "Sleepwalking," you'd never know these hombres typically deal in ferocious punk rock.

From a marketing perspective, however, an indie punk band suddenly putting out a frickin' mariachi record is not exactly a platinum move. In fact, when Caughthran said it was the "punkest thing in the world" for a band like The Bronx to do, he was onto something.

Maybe that's why Mariachi El Bronx seems to have been welcomed by fans. Additionally, the album has no doubt drawn in some listeners who probably wouldn't listen to The Bronx proper.
 
We're OG fans of The Bronx here at RockDex, but even we were surprised to see the huge spike in plays when the band made Mariachi available for streaming on its MySpace on August 18, 2009. RockDex charts the play count at over 35,000.

More recently, The Bronx/Mariachi El Bronx's MySpace (the band uses one account for both incarnations) has enjoyed a couple of spikes this month as well. Traffic increased around February 3 when the band announced a European tour. Making an even bigger impression was El Mariachi's in-studio appearance on world-famous Los Angeles station KROQ on February 23.

But as with any band, MySpace isn't the only place where fans are connecting with The Bronx. February Twitter mentions of Mariachi El Bronx also jumped around the time of the tour announcement, and then again concurrently with the KROQ performance.

And if you're still wondering what's up with these gringos trading in their electric guitars for trumpets and guitarróns, just watch the KROQ video, and you'll understand.

If you'll be in Austin for SXSW in a few weeks, catch Mariachi El Bronx on Wednesday, March 17, at Emo's. Rest assured, we'll be there -- look for the white midwesterners dancing and yelling Orale!

One of the best things about RockDex is that it lets you push aside the punditry, allowing you to examine how real people are reacting to events that are blowing up the media.

A couple of weeks ago, celebrity tunesmith, guitarist and quasi-ladies-man John Mayer said some pretty wack stuff in an interview with Playboy Magazine.

You know. That interview where he compared his male part to a white supremacist and ex-girlfriend Jessica Simpson to "sexual napalm." He also used a racial slur. And, rumor has it, he kicked a small child out the window while saluting Hitler. But that bit hasn't been confirmed.

There was so much coverage of the interview's controversial content, we actually never bothered to read the thing. (Who reads Playboy, anyway?) If you want to, though, it's archived at Playboy.com. Due to that site's overall purpose, you'll want to watch who's around when you click it.

So, anyway, the media backlash. It was so fierce, immediate and palpable that the guitar-playin' fool decided to make apologies at a concert and via Twitter on the day the interview came out, February 10.

Despite Mayer's attempts at apology, the s-word-storm continue to swirl, and the man who was before only suspected of being a douchebag was full-on called out by the press, interest groups, your mom and pops, and basically everyone with at least a dial-up connection.

But how were the actual fans reacting? Were they turning their backs? Were they unfriending his ass by the million?

Hardly.

As RockDex shows, Mayer's page gained more fans on Facebook around February 10-11 than any other time in the previous several months except for a spike on February 3, which was the day his Australia/NZ tour was announced. His growth has declined since the big flap. On February 12, 2,615 people became his fans on Facebook. The day before that: 2,521. On Feb. 17, he dipped down to 1,307, but that's still higher than where he was in December and early January, before the world knew the racist nickname of Mayer's Oscar.

That's a sure sign of support, as the act of becoming an artist's fan on Facebook is a more sentimental act than listening to their music on a corresponding site such as MySpace (where, as a side note, Mayer's song plays hovered around 75,000 per day during this time, neither low nor high for him).

Tweets mentioning Mayer skyrocketed during this time as well, surpassing the 5,000-a-day mark on February 11 and climbing in the ensuing days.

RockDex shows us who the most influential Twitter users talking about Mayer are. And one of those happens to be the Hef himself, verified and in the flesh.

Though we'd never suggest Mayer make an encore performance of that Playboy interview, it didn't seem to hurt his social media numbers.

2009 may be winding down, but there'll be no rest for RockDex. This weekend, Jimmy and Shannon are taking their show on the road once again, traveling first to Minneapolis for the Doomtree Blowout on Friday and Saturday,  and then on to San Francisco for the SF MusicTech Summit on Sunday and Monday.

Though the Doomtree Blowout will no doubt provide a great chance for Jimmy and Shannon to spread the word about RockDex up north, we won't be surprised if they spend the better part of the weekend kicking up trouble with their good friend P.O.S. Assuming they don't all end up on the chain gang, *Cool Hand Luke*-style, they'll get their game faces on at MusicTech, which is a huge gathering of forward-thinking music 2.0 professionals. Representatives from YouTube, IRIS, Pandora, Blip.fm, the Hype Machine and dozens of other services and sites will be there, along with journalists, bloggers and other tastemakers. For a complete rundown of the goings-on at the gorgeous Hotel Kabuki, check out the summit's schedule.

And if you're in the Minneapolis or SF areas this weekend and you would like to learn more about the awesome social music media monitoring powers of RockDex Pro, Jimmy and Shannon are just a phone call or e-mail away. Drop 'em a line at jimmy@musicarsenal.com or shannon@musicarsenal.com or call them at 818-303-3161 to arrange a meeting to discuss what RockDex Pro can do for your band or client.

Sometimes idiocy inspires greatness. The geocentric view of the cosmos? No way, dude: the heliocentric view. Fox News? The Colbert Report. Star Trek: The Motion Picture? Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. You get the idea.

Such was the case when Ariel Hyatt, music marketing maven and founder of Ariel Publicity got her hands on Billboard's 2009 Maximum Exposure List, a self-described "ultimate multimedia metric" that aimed to show musical artists ways of "cutting through the clutter." No. 1 suggestion: Synch placement in a TV ad for Apple. No. 2: Performances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” No. 6: Synch placement in Guitar Hero

Piece of cake, right? Maybe if your last name is MCCARTNEY. Though the directives on Billboard's list probably would get an artist some major exposure (the list is not online, but Ariel archived the 2008 version here), most of them are way out of reach of unsigned or indie musicians just looking for a toe-hold in the whole vastness of it all.

So with help from her colleagues at Cyber PR and folks including Tom Silverman (Tommy Boy Records), Derek Sivers (CD Baby) Jed Carlson (COO of ReverbNation), Rob Gordon (W.A.R.?), Eric Philbrook (ASCAP) and other music insiders and real working musicians, The Indie Maximum Exposure List is chock full of up-to-the-minute advice and must-dos for anyone contemplating a career in music.

Unlike Billboard, which presented a list of specific goals, the Indie Max List reads more like a textbook to making a career out of music in the Internet age. It's organized into seven parts, all of which are chock full of tried-and-true imperatives:

   1. Mindset/Who You are Being
   2. Fostering Relationships
   3. Recording & Releasing Material
   4. Touring / Live Performance
   5. Social Media/Internet Strategy
   6. Online Resources (Where to Submit)
   7. Making Money

RockDex is honored to have been included in the fifth chapter, sharing a hallowed place in the sub-chapter "Study Your Analytics – Google, ReverbNation & RockDex."

Writes Cyber PR's Christina Duren:

"Rockdex can see who is talking about you online and can track how many people are added to each of your social networks by searching blogs, micro-blogs, music sites and delivering you the hard results via reports with actual metrics on how many potential fans have visited your social networking sites."

Considering how much Ariel's awesome guide has already gotten passed around online since appearing on Hypebot last month, we at RockDex are honored, tickled and grateful for being included.

See you on Oprah!

Not.

Hey, it’s no Omaha, but New York during the yearly CMJ Music Marathon and Film Festival can get pretty magical. And hectic. The event brings thousands of music professionals and hundreds of bands to the Big Apple to rock and talk about the industry’s future, something we’re of course very invested in at RockDex.

Jimmy and Shannon from RockDex and Music Arsenal will be in the city Tuesday through Sunday to meet with people one on one about RockDex, and they’d love to hear from you. Shoot them an e-mail at jimmy@musicarsenal.com or shannon@musicarsenal.com or call our office at 818-303-3161. (By the way, if you’re having trouble putting together a bandwatching schedule for the week, guess who’s got an app for that?)

On Thursday at Soho House, Shannon will be participating in a NARM Salon panel discussion titled What Gets Measured Gets Managed: Experts Discuss Metrics and Measurement of Music 2.0. The NARM site is reporting that in-person attendance for the Salon has reached capacity, which is great for us, but not so swell for anyone who hasn’t registered. Fortunately, they’ll be doing a webcast, which you can register for here.

(Image thanks to robby-T)

And it’s not over with CMJ. After he’s recovered from NYC, Jimmy’s heading down to Gainsville, Florida, for the The FEST 8. It’s sorta like a three-day SXSW for punks and indiekids from all over. Spanning Halloween weekend (Oct. 30 – Nov. 1), it should be a good time. Jimmy will be available for meetings and/or vampire slayings.

Closer to home, David is taking his RockDex knowhow to Highlight Midwest this Friday, October 23, in Des Moines. You can reach him at @musicarsenal.

Lots of exciting things! Please get in touch if you'd like to talk.

Michael

         

I've been a fan of AFI for 10+ years so I was interested to hear about their Twitter album revelation. In case you're not familiar, AFI has a new album coming and they're using Twitter to get some buzz going. Basically everytime a certain number of tweets with the hashcode #medicate is reached a new piece of content is revealed on their website. Unofficial AFI News Headquarters did a great job covering the developments.

Fortunately, at RockDex we gather and analyze data all the time so here's the early results....

First, an activity chart of all tweets mentioning AFI in the past 30 days (The second image is of their daily MySpace listens):

   

Clearly, there has been plenty of activity. Between July 5th and July 29th they averaged 204 tweets a day. The average has risen to 1690 tweets a day since the campaign began and July 29th alone had 4519 tweets. What results!

So has the excitement spread? It doesn't seem like it. We dug a little deeper and saw that for the 7 previous days to the campaign AFI had 89,956 MySpace plays. The 7 days after the campaign started they had 86,343 plays... a 4.18% decrease! Likewise, Last.FM listens showed a 7.3% decrease as well during the same periods.

Did this campaign work? Was the campaign only effective on twitter? Lots of people got talking about the record and hopefully that buzz continues. But I think it could have been much more effective....

If you look at AFI's twitter account it's been used 9 times since March. They have 16k+ followers and follow 12k+ people. AFI may have missed a golden opportunity to connect with their fans during this surge of activity. Do you think two weeks down the road a fan would better remember posting "#medicate" to twitter or getting a quick thanks from Davey Havok (or any band member)? Of course you can't respond to everyone who messages you on twitter but if you did a few times a week a fan will be a lot more interested in keeping tabs on and trying to interact with you. Its all about getting the fans super hot and spreading the good word.

This isn't a jab at AFI. One of my favorite shows was seeing them at the Cog Factory in the late 90's when they were little guys. (and I was littler!) Just a few observations on a much talked about marketing campaign.

I'll post next week as more information rises to the top about this campaign.