Sports.  Music.  Politics.  Business.  Film.  No matter where they’re from, every star in the world knows you can’t shine if you won’t sweat.  Because while skill is essential, will is what separates dreamers from achievers.  Perspiration transforms inspiration to results; the same whether you’re designing a light bulb, lighting up a movie screen, or laying down a music track.

 

Amai Liu knows full well that’s how it works.  Effort, vision, and fearlessness are what propelled her to the top of one industry.  Now, the same qualities are compelling her to try and conquer another.  PORN TO POP is the story of her journey from one studio to another, the quest to springboard from being a sizzling adult film star to a successful recording artist. 

 

Like any career change, Amai’s will require the courage to fail, the strength to listen, and the willingness to adapt.  Without those traits, this award winning starlet may never overcome even her most basic discomfort with working out vocals in a recording studio.  But getting past her new backstage-fright won’t be enough.  To make it, Amai will require the support of a team as talented and driven as she is – guys like Mike Ransom and Jason Ruch, the owners, songwriters and producers at her new record label, Unable Records. 

 

Like Amai, they’ve switched career-gears before, having transitioned from the world of performing music, to producing and promoting it.  Now they’re pushing past the boundaries of their roots in punk and metal into the world of hip-hop, R&B, dance and pop.  There may be romance in the notion of discovering a fully formed "American Idol", but the reality is that for every rare star that’s found, there is a galaxy of others that are made: designed and developed long before they’re unveiled or embraced.  It’s a process as old as the popular music industry itself, practiced the same today as it was when Frank Sinatra’s mother had to argue with the Hoboken big-band wonks who wanted to call him Frankie Satin; when Dino Crocetti was de-ethnicized and re-branded Dean Martin; when the TV-starring Monkees suddenly needed music lessons; when Murray Wilson willed his sons into Beach Boys.

 

PORN TO POP is a modern take on an ancient tale that connects four “A's”:  apathy, which is easy; ambition, which is an idea; accolades, which are attractive; and, accomplishments, which are hard.  To break into the music world, Amai needs to risk the comfort she’s achieved in porn.  To craft a hit-maker that will transform their business into media’s next “it” thing, Mike and Jason will need to leap from the art and science that they know and love into parts of their industry they’ve never even considered.  It’s a new adventure for all of them, one that could just as easily launch them as sink them.  What will happen?  To find out, all they have to do is grind. 

 

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