An addendum of my own on our interesting little debate on Better In Time a while back – I never disagreed with your main point about the lack of a main chart follow up for artists, just the specific example you gave because Bleeding Love was still ridiculously huge then so thought you were jumping the gun.

Better In Time is now upto #22 now on Hot100 with sales and airplay rising slowly in unison, with CHR/Pop airplay coming strongly to the party where it is still rising rapidly and already into the top 10. Unfortunately for Leona and her record company Bleeding Love is hanging around AC (#2) and Hot AC (#8) charts like a bad smell so these natural radio supporters for this sort of Pop ballad aren’t yet making their presence felt in terms of chart position.

That is of course entirely down to the glacial speed of (re)programming in these radio formats. I think it’s much harder for songs on the AC/HotAC/Pop side of the great divide to garner simultaneous radio support compared to their Pop/Rhy/Urb counterparts, as the turnover in these latter formats is much quicker. This particularly affects follow up songs from the likes of Caillat, Bareilles et al as their find their previous efforts stubbornly refusing to get out of the way – on Rhythmic for instance Lil Wayne or Rihanna may have three songs bouncing up to a peak and then falling away again in the time it takes a song to hit an AC peak.

Where the “adult” songs do have an advantage it seems is driving consistent album sales – the tortoise does sometimes win out over the hare.

And Billboard Rock Tracks only goes up to either 2002 or 2004 (Joel Whitburn, can you make another one, please?). I also looked through it (while looking, I discovered that “Only Shallow” by My Bloody Valentine hit #27 in 1992, hooray for my format!) can’t couldn’t find another female top 10 either.

But really? I’m surprised that Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” and “Earth Intruders” (which is her biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100 at #84) never even dented the Modern Rock chart.

First off, the most recent solo woman I can find in the Modern Rock Top 10 is from 11 years ago: Sarah McLachlan, with “Building a Mystery” (No. 3, 1997).

PJ Harvey and Björk have had two Top 10 Modern Rock hits each, but Harvey’s is slightly more recent. In order of chart date:

“Sheela-Na-Gig” (PJ Harvey), No. 9, 1992
“Human Behaviour” (Björk), No. 2 (1 week), 1993
“Big Time Sensuality”" (Björk), No. 5, 1994
“Down By the Water” (PJ Harvey), No. 2 (3 weeks), 1995

Each had her last Modern Rock hit in the mid-late ’90s: Björk with “Army of Me” (No. 21, 1995) and PJH with “A Perfect Day Elise” (No. 33, 1998). Weirdly, nothing from later, more radio-friendly albums like 2000’s Stories from the City… or 2007’s Volta made the chart at all, showing how depressingly male-centric modern rock became at the turn of the millennium.

It’s time-consuming to pore through this entire book looking for a more recent solo woman who made the Top 10 — obviously there’s no gender code — but I’ve tried. I’ve checked every Lilith Fair alumna, and McLachlan is the most recent in the Top 10. Meredith Brooks’s “Bitch” made No. 4 in ‘97, a few months before McLachlan. Believe it or not, Alanis hasn’t been on the chart, period, since 1998 (see post-millennium point, above). And Courtney Love did have two Modern Rock hits in 2004, but neither one dented the Top 10.

So I really think McLachlan’s ‘97 hit is it, and M.I.A. will be the first since her. Unreal.

But of course, there is something. (Stupid Internet, let me down.) I picked up the print edition of Billboard yesterday, and they had a feature on Mraz’s single breaking out. Here’s a sentence from the next-to-last paragraph of the article (talk about burying the lede):

Also new is a 30-second Overstock.com TV spot featuring “I’m Yours” that has been running for the past two weeks and will air through Christmas.

I mean, no friggin’ wonder this ancient song is finally a hit.

Good looking on the M.I.A./Bjork/PJ Harvey stat! Is that a fact or a strong hunch?