Milow

Jonathan Vandenbroeck is the 29 year-old singer-songwriter, otherwise known as Milow. This last year has seen Milow have enormous chart success right across Europe with his cover of 50 Cent’s ‘Ayo Technology’. Milow’s career began in 2004 when he was a finalist in the biggest rock contest in Belgium ‘Humo’s Rock Rally’. Within the next few years, and acting as his own manager, Milow achieved 2 gold singles and 2 gold albums in Belgium, eight Music Industry Awards (MIA), and he has released two albums The Bigger Picture and his second Coming of Age. In 2008 it was time for Milow’s career to truly skyrocket. It began with a Belgian radio station who asked Milow to play a cover song as part of a live session. Milow opted for ‘Ayo Technology’, an acoustic guitar cover version of 50 Cent’s original 2007 hit which featured Justin Timberlake. And it worked, to striking, creepy effect. Milow’s everyman yearning and the eerie desperation in his vocals and acoustic-guitar interpretation of the track work incredibly and ingeniously, especially considering its total transformation from a 50 Cent/Justin Timberlake/Timberland strip-club jam. The cover became such a lauded success that it was released as an official single through Milow’s own indie label, Homerun Records, in September 2008 and went straight in at number 1 in both The Belgium and The Netherlands singles chart. The phenomenon soon spread to the rest of Europe, where the track has had massive top 3 successes in Sweden, France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and Austria. The cover has now achieved bigger success than the original in Europe, with both higher single and airplay chart positions. The sexually charged, tongue-in-cheek video for ‘Ayo Technology’ has proved a huge sensation online where it has received over 20 million plays on Youtube alone and has been blogged about extensively, including by celebrity blogger Perez Hilton who said of the song, “Milow improves on the original tremendously. His version is sooooo good.” Kanye West also gave it his seal of approval by posting the video of it on his blog. And what does the man himself want to achieve? “To keep surprising myself, to convince people that I'm more than 'that cover', to write an even stronger album and to play concerts in as many different countries as possible.”