Now that the summer has ended, and the Black Eyed Peas have reached the half-year mark at the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100, it’s time to start thinking about who could knock them off. While looking for insight on which artists could achieve this heretofore-impossible feat, I ran across a Newsweek blog post that was seemingly written by someone who hasn’t really looked at a copy of Billboard in months—i.e., a dude who really thinks that Mariah Carey’s D.O.A. cover of Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is” is going to burn up the charts, despite it sounding not so much “radio ready” as it is “ready for a time-travel trip to a 20th-century dentist’s office.” To clear things up a bit, Idolator’s resident chart expert Chris Molanphy and I took some IM time and tried to figure out which artists realistically had a chance of knocking off the Peas. Lady GaGa? Jason DeRulo? Britney? Nobody??? Our thoughts, after the jump. MORE »
POSTS FROM "a 100 and single special report" CATEGORY
a 100 and single special report
Which Song Has The Best Chance To End The Black Eyed Peas’ Reign Of Hot 100 Terror?
the biz
Now That’s What They Called Synergy! 10 Years of Pooling Hit Singles
In commemorating the first decade of the Now That’s What I Call Music! album series in the United States, Wednesday’s New York Times does a fine job running down the relevant stats: 29 volumes in the main series! 61 million in sales! 12 Britney Spears songs! But the piece fails to mention the core reason that the series—also celebrating a quarter-century in Britain, where it started—launched over here in the first place: the U.S. labels’ murder of the commercial single. MORE »
100 and single
Catchy Deeds, Sold Dirt Cheap: Angus Young Not As Allergic To Singles As He Lets On
For all you vinyl fetishists out there, here are a couple of catalog numbers to look up in your collection of vintage 45s: Atlantic 3761, and Atlantic 3787.
From what classic, hit-single-producing Atlantic act could those be? Aretha Franklin, you’re thinking? Maybe Crosby, Stills and Nash? Phil Collins?
Try AC/DC—those are the U.S. release numbers for the 7-inch singles of “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Back in Black.” Both were relased in 1980; both charted on the Billboard Hot 100. Which is proof that they were, in fact, released as singles—songs weren’t allowed to appear on the Hot 100 prior to 1998 unless the public could buy them at retail for a buck or two.
Of course, as you’ve been reading in the press for the past few weeks, Angus Young and his gang of perpetual adolescents aren’t big fans of buck-a-songs anymore. In fact, they view their albums—the latest of which, Black Ice, hits Wal-Mart shelves exclusively on Monday—as indivisible works of art. That’s why they’ve resisted not only Apple’s industry-dominating iTunes Store and its 99-cent-songs policy, but also all requests to release a greatest-hits album.
Accepting, with a straight face, a comparison of the band’s studio albums to Picasso’s oeuvre means buying into the idea that AC/DC can only be appreciated at album length. But a study of the Aussie-Scottish band’s U.S. sales and chart history suggests that AC/DC thrive on hit songs. And their disinclination to release their most beloved songs either a la carte or on a compilation is likely motivated not by pride but by plain fear of the free market. MORE »
100 and single
Do iTunes Sales Show “High School Musical” Fans Breaking Free Of The Franchise?
In the doldrums of January 2006, several weeks after the annual flurry of post-Christmas music-buying, the iTunes Store was livened up by the sudden appearance on its best-sellers list of a bunch of new hit songs.
It’s not unheard of for the industry to drop new songs in the dead of winter by non-blockbuster, developing acts—but these songs were credited to a bunch of kids who’d never had a hit, or even a shred of major-label promotion.
Within a month, eight songs by this gang of toothsome newcomers with names like “Ashley Tisdale” and “Zac Efron” were on the Hot 100, the largest number of simultaneous charting songs from a single album ever. And that album, the soundtrack to the Disney Channel made-for-TV flick High School Musical, went on to become 2006’s top-selling disc.
The feat was almost precisely duplicated 18 months later, when the flick’s much-hyped sequel premiered. The High School Musical 2 soundtrack spawned seven simultaneous Hot 100 hits and was 2007’s best-selling album until a Josh Groban Christmas CD topped it in the last weeks of December.
In both cases, iTunes sales of single tracks served as early indicators: of the soundtrack albums’ blockbuster futures, and the movies’ repeatability and Zeitgeist-defining success. With High School Musical 3 nine days away from its premiere—in movie theaters this time—and the soundtrack album less than a week out, what are the early iTunes indicators telling us?
Call me an old sourpuss, but they’re telling me that, as a musical force at least, this franchise might be spent. MORE »
100 and single
Once More, With Loathing: Are Labels Moving To Kill The Single Again?
Last Friday, one of the regular commenters on my “100 and Single” column poured cold water all over my prediction that Estelle’s “American Boy” might finally creep into the U.S. Top 10. Noted regular reader ukidol, “Estelle’s song has been removed from iTunes since the start of the week, so she’ll drop sharply in the next chart. Think they’re hoping for a Kid Rock-style album boost.”
We won’t find out how Estelle fared until the new Hot 100 appears later today, but yesterday’s release of SoundScan figures bears out ukidol’s prediction. “American Boy,” which the prior week was the sixth-best selling digital song in the country, fell to 64th, as its sales took a 78% tumble from 86,700 copies to 19,100 copies. (Presumably, virtually all of those 19,100 copies sold in the first day or two of the tracking week before the song got pulled from iTunes.)
As of last week, “American Boy” was at No. 11 on the big chart. While the radio half of the Hot 100’s sales-plus-airplay formulation might keep the song from falling out of the Top 40, no amount of radio growth will keep it from dropping at least a double-digit number of slots–if not this week, then the next. MORE »
100 and single
Every Other Song to the Left, to the Left: Beyonce Takes 2007’s Hot 100 Title
Ed. note: Chris “dennisobell” Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on the Billboard Hot 100 in the latest installment of “100 And Single.” This week, he takes a break from the regular charts, which are sleepy just before the holiday, to focus on the hits of the year:
A couple of weeks ago in this space, we tried to handicap the likely winners on Billboard’s year-end charts. Well, we’d like to tell you there was a last-minute, super-exciting, left-field surprise, but things went pretty much as expected. Thanks to the strange December-to-November “chart year” Billboard uses to calculate its year-end tallies, two releases that got their start back when 2006’s turkeys were in the oven are the big winners for 2007: Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable,” and Chris Daughtry’s self-monikered debut album. Maura has already covered the latter, so let’s focus on Billboard’s No. 1 Hot 100 song of the year. MORE »
