tobesolouis

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i need a full fic version of this now

Caswen but they’re in the pining stage, and they keep on spending time together because their respective favorite people (red and ashlyn) are dating. Outings sort of become unofficial double dates

wait shut up i love this.

big red and ash would plan to get lunch and then invite their resident sad sacks to stop them just aimlessly existing all weekend. ricky and ej would end up getting squeezed into the same side of a tiny booth, thighs pressed together and all ricky would be able to think is that ej’s cologne smells a lot nicer than throb. at one point ricky would get up to use the restroom and when he comes back ej’s thrown an arm over the back of the seat, probably not in any intentional way, but when ricky sits down again he can feel the warm line of it against his neck.

they all go mini golfing because ashlyn says it’s better with four. ricky has no idea where she got that from because they end up splitting into two’s anyway; big red and ash spending more time making goo goo eyes at each other than actually playing, ej and ricky spending more time getting heated over points and trying to speedrun the course. at the windmill, ej scoffs at ricky’s stance and ricky levels him with a look.

“you know i play like, real golf, right?” ej tells him, raising an eyebrow.

“of course you do,” ricky says witheringly and thrills at ej’s briefly affronted look.

“look, just–” ej starts and then ricky feels hands curling around his hips, tilting him a little straighter. “there you go,” ej murmurs, his voice all low and kind of rumbly, like a rolling engine. ricky keeps his eyes on the stupid rotating windmill and swallows, throat dry. ej’s hands slip away and ricky takes the shot, the little white ball rolling evenly and perfectly into the hole. there’s a brief moment of silence.

“that was a coincidence,” ricky says quickly, but when he spins around ej’s already grinning.

“you’re welcome, bowen,” ej tosses over his shoulder as he wanders over to the next hole.

ricky ends up winning and he’s incredibly suspicious about it. even ashlyn seems surprised.

“you lost,” she tells ej, like he needs to hear it. he probably does.

“yeah,” ej says, handing over their putters to the guy at the register.

ashlyn squints at him. “you lost,” she says again, “at golf.”

apparently this is exceptionally meaningful as ashlyn and ej then proceed to stare each other down for a solid ten seconds. “yeah,” ej says again and this time ashlyn hums, glancing at ricky in a way that has him feeling a little like he’s under a microscope.

in my mind they go on several of these not-dates until one day ash and big red just don’t turn up to lunch and ej doesn’t seem surprised in the slightest. because ricky isn’t stupid he says, “you just gonna keep tricking me into dates?”

ej smiles, slow. “i don’t know,” ej says, leaning forward to steal one of ricky’s fries. “do i have to keep pretending to lose at things?”

ricky kicks him under the table but lets ej hold his hand on top of it.

#well. all signs point to me making this an actual fic #caswen #ej x ricky #mine: writing

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i dont like one direction but can i still be your friend

absolutely not

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i was told i could be more controversial on here with little repercussions so here i go

…

5sos gay af just like one direction gay af

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“usually doomed from the start.” watch me cry.

New 'Bootcamp' boyband.

According to sources a new boyband has been formed at Bootcamp with 5 solo contestants thought to be more promising as a group.

The boyband made up of auditionees: Louis Tomlinson, Harry Styles, Liam Payne, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik

(Liam being one of this years re-auditonee’s) The boyband are yet unamed.

Previous groups formed at Bootcamp have usually been doomed from the start and although usually making it through to the live shows don’t go much further. Futureproof, Hope and Miss Frank to name the most well known,

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he’s so pretty it’s unfair

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How Sony deals with fandoms

I’ve been to an international in-house PR summit hosted by one of my clients this week and nearly fell off my chair when one of the guest speakers was a VERY important person from Sony Music Entertainment. Let’s call him John. I won’t disclose his function and real name because I don’t want to reveal where I was, but based on his title he definitely knows what he‘s saying and has a lot of industry experience.

His speech was mainly  about how to engage with a variety of different target audiences. Of bloody course one of the first slides he showed was a picture of 1D engaging with fans which was supposed to drive the point home that there are some audiences who are more passionate about a brand than others.He mentioned then that he’s worked with 1D on their albums which drove me into a bit of a freeze.

Because I’m embarrassing, I recorded parts of his speech on my phone and wrote the most important things down to share some interesting insights he gave about how Sony manages their artists’ target audiences, crafts their artists’ social media actions and deals with the fact that at the end of the day they always need to get people to buy music.

  HOW DOES SONY UNDERSTAND AND MONITOR AUDIENCES (like fandoms for instance)?

According to John, they have their very own data-driven digital tool that helps them identify and manage different target groups for an artist (it’s not perfected yet but has been rolled out a lot of countries, I think he said 50?) and see where there might be connections to other artists, who the influencers are, what the specific target groups are or will be interested in and to identify collaboration opportunities. Target groups are being split into four categories: Fanatics, enthusiasts, casuals, indifferents. These segments are being broken down into even smaller groups defined by age, genre preference, gender and country. They found that the older you get, the less likely you’ll be a fanatic or enthusiast. How does Sony find this stuff out? Well, they survey polled music audiences of every age in a way that covers either nationally representatives or represent one of the major top tier cities. People shared their music preferences, consumption habits, lifestyle, media habits etc. Sony gathered all that information, analysed the insights and created their own audience understanding tool.

According to John, that way everyone at Sony has access to an interactive map of the world of Sony that looks into segmentations and audiences for every artist while being searchable in a number of different ways. The tool is pulling from real data, but they are also adding to that „with things like analytics of platforms like Spotify where we are able to gather lots of informations about user behaviours and reference that against things that we do“.

  HOW SONY STRATEGICALLY SHAPES PR STORIES

John gave the example of Snoop Doggy Dog who had launched a new album (song? Idk) around that time: „There was a week-long debate in parliament around the legalization of Marihuana, so we just jumped on this conversation and did lots of social marketing around Snoop with his rolling papers and his spliffs… so maybe that’s bad taste, I’ll allow you to judge that for yourselves. The point is though that you are also marketing into a wider cultural context. [You need] an understanding how that works and where you can have a conversation that is seamless and not fake, genuineness is quite important.

“The way you can get people to connect is: You’ve got a lot of stuff that you want to say. Start under the assumption that people actually don’t give a shit about 95 percent of it. And then see which are the bits that might overlap. This is where the understanding of the audience really comes into its own. It forces us to think before we jump to execution. The quest for relevance is vitally important.”

Why are people to connect with a brand/band though? John thinks this is one of the most underused questions when planning an approach. Why is it that they do specific things? He gave an example: „We would normally take a record to radio because we always believe that radio is the thing that breaks the record. But if my core audience, my phase one audience – the people that are gonna give that band its first lift – are on Spotify, what am I doing on radio??“

ENGAGEMENT AROUND ARTIST IS KEY

„The thing is that you don’t start with a conversation around a product. The consumption of the product is the end point of a journey where you built an engagement and a fan. So again, for us that means that when we sit down and do our plan around our next Robbie Williams album, we start with „How are we gonna maximize the engagement around Robbie Williams“? because that will then sell us albums. Not „Okay, we’ll be releasing in a week in November, eight weeks out we need to be here, here and here“. So we’re not doing product launches anymore unless [it is suitable for the target demographic]. We have to built a tension and an engagement around an artist.“

  ABOUT THEIR ARTISTS‘ SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS

„We run most of our artists social media channels or at least their official  pages, so we are involved in all of those conversations.“

Shocking, I know.

Based on the situation we face in this fandom,with this band, feel free to draw your own conclusions about what this information means.

HERE ARE MY KEY TAKEAWAYS:

1.       It’s not news at all, but the existence of their own audience understandig tool confirms it: the 1D fandom is being monitored, segmented and analyzed. Sony’s strategies are tightly tied to that fact. Collaborations or artist interactions such as Louis/James Arthur or One Direction/ Little Mix are most likely the result of a data-driven analysis of whose fan groups are similar and whose are likely to be open towards that particular other artist too.

2.       Again no news, but the example of Snoop Doggy Dog shows that there are strategies behind even the most random photos. Often placements of specific pictures or stories serve a wider purpose. Hello pap walks, hello b**ygate, hello Louis Twitter, hello Liam visibly being linked to L.A.‘s cool singer/songwriter crowd before his first album drop.  

3.       The decision to not promote Louis‘ song could very well have been a logical outcome of the team asking themselves the question „Why?“: Why should we promote his song with huge effort when we KNOW his own fans are going to do it passionately, especially if they think  we don’t give a shit? Why not playing that game in order to make them promo it the hardest way they can?“ Why indeed??

4.       One Direction is a huge deal for Sony. John was talking about a lot of bands during his speech but whenever he was talking about major acts, he always listed One Direction amongst them (along with gems like Beyonce, David Bowie, Adele). He name-dropped them at least 5 -6 times in a 60 minute speech. He really didn’t have to because the audience was in no way whatsoever a target audience. So yes, they clearly have been and are a very huge deal for them.

5.       The part about social media? Well :))))))

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I have put together a Google Drive folder with ALL of the songs from Niall that aren’t on his albums. This includes:

- Wasted - Dress - Nothing - Finally Free (live) - So Long

Covers: - Life in the Fast Lane - New York State of Mind - Dancing in the Dark - Circles - With or Without You - Dancing in the Moonlight - Where The Streets Have No Name - Scared to be Lonely - Crying in the Club

Live Albums: - All the performances from Royal Albert Hall - All the performances from Best of the Pub - All the performances from Flicker World Tour Live in Amsterdam  - 3 performances from Red Rocks

Go to THIS GOOGLE FOLDER and download the songs!

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liam covered zayn’s part in night changes. this is what they sound like together.

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so cute😭

Liam Payne but it’s only the memes

1D version I Harry version I Louis version

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the best zigi memes

i don’t own any of these and they are all purely a joke

Keep reading

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and we’re supposed to believe they still hate each other when:

1. louis liked zayn’s post about the baby

2. liam listened to Better on instagram live

3. zayn talked about niall’s being his favorite music in an interview

all in the past six months? why so much interaction so fast?

I find it ridiculously funny how many narratives were put forward to convince us that Zayn dislikes the rest of the 1D boys and vice versa.

We get a public falling out (that not only Zouis were a part of, Liam kind of initiated it), several, ESPECIALLY WRITTEN, interviews about how they have no contact at all and jokes thrown around about zebras. All those articals on the topic of the band shading Zayn, lord.

All those quotes about how the other boys did not want to keep in touch with Zayn. How he and Harry have never really talked. We are basically forced to believe there is no other option than the fact that they hate each other. It’s funny, because we all know those things are not true. And to be completely honest? They are not even putting in the work to make this all belivable. 

I mean, within a few months we got interviews were Zayn announced that only one of the boys kept in touch with him. At first it was Niall, suddenly it turned out to be Liam. I did not know those two shared a body at one point, huh. The awkward silence every time Zayn was mentioned in a 1D interview? Media-trained artists reacting that way every single time? C’mon. They so clearly had a planned reaction to those questions, yet we would still get that damned silence every time. 

The Zouis affair. It seems to be resolved only for it to be brought up again after a while. It’s been 6 years. Give them an actual reason to hate one another and stick to it if you want to keep this going. Please. 

A fun fact: Zayn has only liked Louis’ fatherhood annoucing post. The same happened the other way round. That’s it.

How do things like this one happen and we are still this deep into the whole narrative? How.

One more interesting thing: Niall is the one member of One Direction that Zayn ALWAYS brings up when he is asked about the band. He does this all the time. We just let him.(I know that it is impossible not to love Niall, but as far as not really being close with your former bandmates goes, you Mr Malik, are doing a terrible job at that to be honest)

This whole situation is just laughable. Nothing here makes sense. Not one thing. They talk to one another, they can’t look at each other, oh, they are talking again, my bad. 

Yeah, I only talk to Niall .Yeah, I only talk to Liam. Oh, I’ve never really talked to Harry.

The hardest thing about Zayn leaving? The paperwork for sure. Love you Zayn. We miss you. Of course, I love Zayn.

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it pains me that liam has openly talked about shit they went through and shit he continues to go through but because he appears to be laughing it off, people ignore the blatant truth coming out of his mouth. please LISTEN to what liam says.

i'm depressed and it's late and i'm thinking about liam again

tw // alcohol, trauma

I’m feeling a little emo about the fact that Liam was set up to be the frontman and carried the band through the x factor because he had the most experience and the strongest voice, and his stage confidence was needed to help the rest of the boys feel comfortable onstage.

Because of this, he was expected to be the babysitter for the rest of the boys, not allowed to be a teenager with the rest of them. And when things went awry, Liam was expected to tell his friends to pull it together and keep them in line. And he was held responsible for their shenanigans. 

And then sht happened, and he was alcoholic and depressed and taking medicine to help with that, except it only made him dizzy onstage and forget his lyrics, leading him to develop stage fright that he still lives with to this day.

And then he had left the band but things hadn’t gotten better, he was still forced to stunt and given his own babygate, on top of still carrying the role of the 1d-narrative-pusher, and made to lie on behalf of his friends as well as himself.

He was given an image that doesn’t fit him at all, of a sex-obsessed hypermasculine Straight Guy, and that image was pressed on him so hard that he wasn’t allowed to release the music that he’d wanted to and instead had an album full of songs that he didn’t even write. He was made to do a photoshoot that he was uncomfortable with, so he was given tequila to calm him down despite his struggles with alcohol. He was painted as a homophobe, despite being queer himself. 

He’s also been more open about his personal struggles than anyone else in the band, and has talked candidly about the challenges he’s faced and the things he’s been put through by tptb and even the general public, and still NO ONE talks about it. Instead, he basically has no solo fanbase and is largely ignored by ot5s who only pay attention to him when he talks about One Direction or interacts with one of the other members. And even worse, he’s the subject of constant ridicule and slander by people who are fans of his band and those associated with it.

And YET he’s still so pure and kind. He gives his platform to women and people of color. He made online content for his fans to enjoy while stuck at home in the pandemic. He ran FOUR online shows for charity with reasonably priced tickets and merch that he specifically designed with the fans in mind. He goes out of his way to give love to his former bandmates, despite that energy not always being matched in return. He is still silly and good and loving, despite going through so much. We don’t deserve him, and I will never take Liam slander ever.

#liam payne #one direction #nobody is listening

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i will scream about how fake and planned the entertainment industry is until my last dying breath😁

me: _____ was a stunt/was used for publicity/isn't real

annoying person who believes everything the media tells them: oh so i guess EVERYTHING is a stunt now huh? what about--

me: yes

them: even--

me: yep

them: oH sO i gUeSs tHe wHoLe InDuStRy iS fAkE hUh? HUH

me: yes

them:

me: it's literally the entertainment industry

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holy wow the way he says 1🥵

Niall via bbcradio1 tiktok 3/20/21

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Bucky Barnes: " I am no longer the Winter Soldier"

White bitch *pretends to be Captain America*

Bucky Barnes: "I am once again the Winter Soldier."

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enemies to friends to lovers i’m begging

The Falcon and The Winter Solider (2021)

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HOW IS HE SO PERFECT

SAM WILSON in EP01

THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER