From hit songs like “Dance Floor Anthem” and “I Just Wanna Live”, The Madden brothers take on a new and exciting entrepreneurial venture: MDDN. A community focused on emerging artists established by ‘artists for artists, to share knowledge, experience and relationships, protect and nurture their careers, while mentoring positive growth’.
Co-founder of MDDN and band member of Good Charlotte, Joel Madden attended this year’s Advertising Week APAC in Sydney as a speaker on the Global Keynote Stage alongside Drake Sutton-Shearer, CEO and Founder of PRØHBTD MEDIA for an intimate conversation regarding the evolution of his career.
From humble beginnings, Joel formed Good Charlotte alongside his brother Benji in their garage 22 years ago in 1996. Joel explains that he has witnessed “not only the music industry change culturally but all industries changing several times over” he elaborates that it’s about “who survives all those changes”.
“There’s no genres anymore, it’s a a blend. It’s in the hands of the people.”
In the rapidly changing musical and digital landscape, Joel believes who and what makes it in the industry is decided on platforms. Platforms like Twitter are heavily involved in the “deciding of the success or fate of something or someone based on information you’re getting in real-time… that’s the world we’re living in”.
Behind MDDN, is of course, Joel and Benji but also an incredible team who thrives off energy and creativity. MDDN runs off the principles that brands want truly authentic partnership – a recurring theme at Advertising Week APAC Sydney. Joel emphasized that it’s “not a numbers game… in the sense that you can’t just buy and audience”.
“You have to find your audience. Then you create FOR them”
Joel says he experienced a lot of trial and error, experiencing and learning from the things that did right and the things they did wrong. A major example of MDDN’s success on focusing on principles of authenticity and catering for an audience is one of their biggest clients, Jessie J and her tremendous impact and influence on China.
China is an explosive marketplace and hyper challenging as Sutton-Shearer highlights. Jessie J was recently on the biggest singing platform in China and one of the largest in the world with weekly viewership of 150 million people. Alongside this television success, the aftermath resulted an influx of digital views as she was trending #1 on Weibo, the most used Chinese microblogging social media platforms. Now she has become one of the biggest western pop-artists in China.
“If you do good business and fair business in any market, you can succeed. As long as you’re transparent… you can do good business”.
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