Breaking America takes more than one viral moment. Here is what it actually takes, and the order it usually has to happen in.
It takes U.S. radio relationships, press in outlets like Billboard and Rolling Stone, late-night and morning-show television bookings, playlist placements, and the right collaborations, all timed correctly.
Any one of those on its own tends to produce a spike and then silence. The reason campaigns fail is almost never that a single element was missing. It is that the elements arrived in the wrong order, or all at once with nothing behind them.
Before anything is booked, the question is which song, and whether it is the right one for the American market and for the platform you want it to work on. We identify the music direction: what works for your voice, what you are passionate about, and which sound fits each platform right now.
Writing sessions can be arranged, or the right song found. This is the step most international teams skip, and it is the one that decides the ceiling of everything after it.
A national radio campaign places your single with Top 40 pop, A/C, Dance and Rhythm stations across America. It requires a full national team and decades of programmer relationships.
Most importantly it requires the right timing. A campaign run before the project is ready burns the relationships a later campaign depends on. Anyone worth hiring tells you when to wait.
Home-market success does not transfer automatically into American coverage. The angle that works in Seoul or Tokyo or Mumbai is often not the angle a U.S. editor can publish.
That reframing is the work: thousands of placements across Billboard, Rolling Stone, Time, The New York Times, Forbes, MTV, Vogue, Elle, Paper, People and television from Good Morning America to Jimmy Fallon.
Connecting artists creates a whole new kind of magic. When you merge fan bases you break the boundaries of regions and cultures, and that is an essential piece of breaking into the U.S. market. BTS with Steve Aoki and with Halsey; Monsta X with Pitbull, French Montana and Sebastian Yatra.
A sync puts your music in front of an American audience that was not looking for it. Monsta X went into The SpongeBob Movie with Snoop Dogg, into Riverdale, and became the first Korean act to guest-star on We Bare Bears. Wonho went into XO, Kitty on Netflix.
Longer than one release. The campaigns above ran over years, not weeks, and the sequencing is what made them work.
No. We work with a wide selection of distribution partners and pitch for a signing or JV when the time is right.
K-pop and idol acts are our specialty, but the roster spans the globe, from Bollywood's Madhuri Dixit and India's Armaan Malik to U.S. talent like Delilah Belle and Coco Quinn, and J-pop's SG5.
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Every project is assessed individually — a custom plan, from planning through execution. Or email info@lusivex.com.