Menudo 67.0!

ANDY HERMANN checks in from Blogger's Banquet with a Morphizm sureshot on Latin pop's hyperreal engineering. Replicants come in all flavors, cultures, capital. Hey, it's pop:

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You probably didn't hear about it, but something happened last week that at least one record executive is calling "the future of our business." Auditions began to find five young men to form a new incarnation of Menudo, the Puerto Rican pop group that sold over 40 million albums in the '70s and '80s and launched the career of Ricky Martin. The reconstituted Menudo will be selected by fans from a pool of 30 finalists, and is scheduled to have an album out on Epic Records in late 2007. That was Epic president Charlie Walk hailing Menudo as the way of the future.

So what makes an old retread like Menudo so futuristic, as opposed to some other pre-fab pop group like, say, Danity Kane? Ultimately, it comes down to this: All the interested parties are treating Menudo as a brand name first and a band second. A company called Menudo Entertainment bought the rights to the name in 2003; they have nothing to do with Ricky Martin or anyone else who was in the band's various earlier lineups. And they're selling an "equity stake" in the Menudo brand to Epic, so the label can look forward to reaping profits not just from the band's album sales, but from all of its merchandising, touring, ringtones, an animated television series and, last but not least, a 10-episode MTV reality show. No wonder Epic's president is so excited. Who cares if CD sales continue to slide -- now a band can make a tidy profit off the action figures alone!

If the Menudo project is a success -- and my guess is that, with the growing market for Latin music, it will be -- you can bet you'll seeing more bands on the horizon in which the members are basically just hired guns, with the label or another third party owning the rights to the name, calling the creative shots, and reaping most of the profits. This isn't entirely a new game -- the original master was boy band impresario Lou Pearlman, who was inspired by his success in helping to break *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys to start the process from scratch and assemble O-Town. But the degree to which the new Menudo will be entirely a corporate creation is pretty unprecedented.

So remember, kids -- next time you're illegally downloading those songs instead of buying them like you're supposed to, you're pushing one more major label towards dumping your favorite band in favor of one they cobble together themselves. Sort of gives a whole new meaning to the words "corporate rock," doesn't it?