Frank Kogan

Ah, I hear this, though I can also hear that the Pancakes are indie and the other two aren't, though if you'd told me that Stefanie Sun was indie I'd have believed you.

Given that Taylor isn't particularly strange in her sound, and she's currently the top-selling pop artist in the United States*, she totally disrupts the genre map right now, doesn't match anything. She'd be too pop for country except fortunately country isn't ready to abandon her; but she doesn't line up with anything else that's hitting as pop. The core of pop music that hits in the U.S. is r&b, though Lady GaGa's success over the last year and a half has introduced an International r&b-dance amalgam, which I'd expected to have been really pleased by but surprisingly I'm not, for the most part (I don't mind GaGa and I like the big Black Eyed Peas hits, but I'm almost completely blank on Jason DeRulo and Iyaz and Jay Sean).

Do you know how Lady GaGa is doing in Asia? My first inkling of her was when I saw her do "Just Dance" in a vid of the Miss Universe swimsuit competition in Hanoi in early '08. It took many months after that before she finally hit in the U.S.

Were M2M big in China in '00? They had a relatively gentle sound, and I know they were huge in Southeast Asia; when Marion Raven began her comeback in late '05 she had her first showcase in Singapore. But from what you're saying of the Chinese sound, I'd think that Marit Larsen would be the one with more of a shot at a Chinese Feist-friendly market. Of all the people with pop pedigree, Marit's the one I'd call "indie pop." I'm not sure why she hasn't succeeded more internationally, on the international post-Bjork artpop circuit; but she's shy and may simply want to keep small-scale and holed up in Norway.



*The Susan Boyle album will end up moving more units than Fearless, but Boyle will still fundamentally be an anomaly, is my guess.