ABSTRACT
On 25 May 2007, Malaysia’s largest and oldest mobile telecommunications
company Celcom officially appointed Indonesia’s best-known music group
Peterpan as the company’s new ‘power icon’ as part of its marketing strat-
egy. Under the newly launched service called Channel X, the company’s
mobile phone subscribers will be able to download truetones, wallpapers
and ‘Call Me Tones’ from Peterpan’s newest album Hari Yang Cerah (A
Clear Day) and the group’s previous albums Taman Langit (Sky Garden)
and Bintang di Surga (Star in Heaven). In addition to that, ‘Celcom customers can also get exclusive Peterpan voicemail greetings through Channel
X’; and in return Celcom ‘secured exclusive rights to use Peterpan’s music
and images for mobile downloads and the band will also be featured in
some of the Company’s print and TV advertisements’ (Mobile88.com 2007).
The company’s move can be appreciated within its immediate context. By
then, an estimated 200,000 copies of Peterpan’s various albums had been
sold in Malaysia alone, when most of their domestic counterparts did not
sell more than half that amount (Sartono 2007a), and two years earlier the group’s live performance mesmerized a 30,000-strong audience who sang
along enthusiastically to the songs, outdoing the artists on stage.
