By the time you finish reading this article, Isaac, Taylor and Zac, or collectively known as Hanson, have just wrapped up another concert in Canada. Maybe they’re on their way back in the US to prepare for another tour.
The band that popularized the catchy bubblegum “MMMBop” visited the country last week for a two-night concert in Manila and Cebu. The Philippine visit is part of the Shout It Out World Tour that kicked off sometime in 2010 and was resumed in September 2011. The main goal of the tour is to promote Shout It Out, Hanson’s 8th studio album, originally released in June 2010.
For the Manila concert at the Smart Araneta Coliseum, Hanson failed to fill up the venue. By estimate, the crowd occupied just 30 to 40 percent of the venue.
Hanson is still a good act, great act if you will. It’s only awkward for the audience to hear “MMMbop,” the band’s most popular and most successful single to date, sang a pitch or two lower. That is because Isaac, Zac, and more particularly Taylor (the band’s main vocalist) have all grown up and developed deeper voices.
Shout It Out tour is aimed to woe more fans but it seems unlikely in the Philippines.
Flop
It’s a gamble for concert promoters to bring foreign acts in the country most especially if the artists were popular in the past decades.
Case in point, 58-year-old Cyndi Lauper, who was at the Big Dome on March 17. The show was a big disappointment. But we believe the feeling was mutual because Cyndi’s entourage was expecting a big crowd but they were surprised to see Araneta Coliseum looking like a velodrome.
One good thing about it, Cyndi performed like she used to do when she was younger. She jumped up and down the stage and even went down reach out to her loyal followers.
Cyndi is a great artist. Although we can only count her hits with the fingers in one hand, poor publicity did the concert in. The concert producer focused more on radio advertising to promote Cyndi’s concert when in fact aggressive television, print and new media promotion can make a big difference to reach a target audience.
(Published in the Manila Standard Today newspaper on /2012/April/11)