LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - Animated chimps having sex, a smattering of radio airplay and a college tour don't exactly add up to a traditional path to Billboard's Top Latin Albums chart. But Sony Music Latin threw out its rulebook when it came to the new act Da'Zoo.
The Puerto Rican quartet's self-titled debut album -- a funky mix of innuendo, hip-hop, pop-rock and dance music -- sold fewer than 1,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, with 96% of sales from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Still, that was enough to land the group at No. 33 on Top Latin Albums and No. 6 on Latin Pop Albums.
But sales are nearly beside the point for a brand new band whose initial strategy has centered on building a story virally and with the help of sponsors. The band, which had gigged locally on the island, started with three guys but added a female vocalist after being introduced to Sony.
Before the album was done, Sony hired Biancu Animations to make a viral cartoon based on "Chitu," a song that some radio stations picked up after it gained steam online. The goofy video, about a love triangle involving a man, a woman and a monkey, has generated more than 82,000 views on YouTube.
Since then, the group's first radio single, "Excuse Me," has bubbled under the Latin Pop airplay chart -- where it is currently 47 -- after it was serviced to club DJs.
"It's hard to pitch a new artist when you have no story to tell," says Ruben Leyva, managing director of U.S. Latin at Sony Music Entertainment. "Now, more often than not, we're getting, 'Yeah, we've heard of them."'
The band recently wrapped a 15-date tour of Puerto Rican colleges sponsored by a local radio station and newspaper. The band drove between gigs in a red Ford Focus wrapped in the Da'Zoo logo (the car appears in the "Excuse Me" video).
Other sponsors have included Coors, which is backing the band's summer tour in Puerto Rico, and Instituto de Banca y Comercio, a chain of trade schools on the island that's featuring Da'Zoo in its advertising. "It has been very easy to get sponsors for this group because they're different," Sony/Day 1 Puerto Rico VP Tuti Bou says.
One of those differences, besides the cheeky tone, is the band's sprinkling of English in just the right amounts. "It comes out naturally," says vocalist Elizabeth Fuentes, a.k.a. Eli-Joe. "In Puerto Rico, we speak Spanglish. We invent words. We have that advantage that we can span both Spanish and English."
(Editing by Dean Gooodman at Reuters) (please visit our entertainment blog via www.reuters.com or on http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare/)
