If you're trying to guess what might end up as Billboard's top song of 2008, you might take a gander at this week's Hot 100, where a prime contender is still sitting in the top three after peaking months ago.

That would be Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love," the neo-diva ballad that's outlasted anything her role model Mariah Carey has released so far this year. According to Nielsen SoundScan, which released its (mostly dismal) midyear report this week, Lewis' smash is the top-selling single for the six-month period beginning Dec. 31 and ending June 29.

That doesn't necessarily make the Lewis track a lock for the year's top prize, due to some technicalities which I'll discuss momentarily. But there is one thing that makes "Bleeding Love" emblematic of 2008: it's an undeniable smash single which has proven tough for the artist to follow up.

According to SoundScan, the first-half '08 best-sellers are "Bleeding Love," at 2.6 million downloads, Flo Rida's "Low" featuring T-Pain, with 2.4 million, and Jordin Sparks' duet with Chris Brown, "No Air," which sold 2.1 million. All three songs are currently charting on the Hot 100. This week, about two months after its four-week run at No. 1, "Bleeding" sits pretty at No. 3. Sparks' ballad, after peaking at No. 3, just fell out of the Top 10 last week, but it's still hanging on to the Top 20 at No. 18. And the unkillable former No. 1 "Low," now in its 36th week on the chart, finally falls out of the Top 40, down six spots to No. 42.

The Lewis and Sparks tracks sold virtually all of their copies in calendar 2008. But Flo Rida's hit did serious business last year—about another one and a half million sold in 2007. "Low," already the biggest-selling digital track of all time and still selling well (it ranks 52nd among this week's top digital songs), is now about 5,000 copies shy of total cumulative sales of 4 million.

Mr. Rida's 2007 sales are important to our discussion here, because as I've explained in this space before, Billboard persists in using an annoyingly skewed "chart year" in its year-end tallies, one that runs from Dec. 1 to Nov. 30. That extra month of sales will give "Low" a huge advantage in the year-end tally: it hit its stride last December and rose to No. 1 just after Christmas, months before anyone in America had even heard of Lewis.

Lewis is an established pop star in the UK, with three top hits to her credit (two No. 1's and a double-sided No. 2 single). It's too soon to say how she'll be regarded here, but so far, the Lewis phenomenon in America is all about one massive song; Sony/BMG has held off formally releasing a second single until mid-July. I say "formally," because of course, in the digital age, once an album is released any of its songs are de facto singles; and on the modern-day charts, any song radio chooses to play is Hot 100-eligible, regardless of a label's marketing plans.

So far, neither the public nor radio programmers have flocked to a second Lewis song en masse. The label's planned second hit is the thumping, midtempo pop track "Better in Time," which has been charting on Billboard's Pop 100 list for nearly two months (peaking at No. 45, now down a bit), but it has made no impression on the big chart. "Better" is Lewis' second-biggest seller at iTunes, but comparing it to "Bleeding" is like comparing a minnow to a baleen whale. Among all digital tracks, "Better" only ranks 176th in sales this week, with 8,200 copies. These are decent numbers for a song that's received little formal promotion as yet, but they're a little anemic for the followup single to the year's best-selling hit.

Lewis shouldn't be too dejected by this state of affairs—it's been a tougher year than expected for pop divas to follow up their hits. As I alluded above, Carey has had a tough time after her latest album produced a quick-burning No. 1, "Touch My Body." In the time it's taken Lewis' handlers to milk "Bleeding Love" for sales and airplay, Carey's people have already squeezed all they can out of "Touch" (now ranked No. 59 in its 20th and final week on the Hot 100); tried and failed with a second single, "Bye Bye" (peaked at No. 19, now down to No. 69); and started promoting a third hit, the Idolator-approved "I'll Be Lovin' U Long Time." That third Carey single debuts this week at No. 100...on the Pop 100, not the Hot 100, where it is still M.I.A. So much for the year of Mimi.

And forget the divas—what about digital-sales giant Flo Rida? After "Low," his Timbaland-assisted second single "Elevator" was a flop, peaking quickly at No. 16 before plummeting off the chart in under three months. And one week after his third single, "In the Ayer," debuted at a more-than-solid No. 38, it's down to No. 40.

Other than Sparks, who can still hope that her post-American Idol album will produce a third Top 10 charter ("One Step at a Time" debuts this week at No. 79), none of this year's biggest smash songs has been followed by a serious hit.

That's not to say no one is having a good year: Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" is finally giving way to "A Milli" (up seven spots to No. 14); and Rihanna, still riding "Take a Bow" in the top five, has "Distrubia" waiting in the wings (up seven to No. 11—a surprise after her fluke debut last week).

But in a digital-fueled, singles-based economy, the charts are getting crueler all the time.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• As we forecast last week, the Jonas Brothers made a splashy debut on the chart. "Burnin' Up" materializes all the way up at No. 5—the second-biggest debut of the year after David Cook's No. 3 appearance last month with "The Time of My Life."

The Jonases probably would have placed even higher if the song had stronger radio airplay—thus far, it's nonexistent on the Hot 100 Airplay list, but it ranks 31st on the all-Top 40 Pop 100 Airplay list. Expect "Burnin'" to hold on or move higher, unless fans get distracted by a succession of pre-album Jonas singles Disney plans to drop in the next few weeks. Speaking of which...

• A few weeks ago in this space, I talked at length about the unusual multi-single strategies fueling the recent blockbuster albums by Lil Wayne and Coldplay. According to a story in last week's Billboard, this is a more coherent strategy than I first suspected, and (like so many things on the charts these days) it's spurred by iTunes:

"Releasing a single for digital download before an album's debut is about as standard these days as making it available to radio. But in the past few months, labels and artists have begun releasing multiple tracks in advance of an album's street date to promote new releases, relying in no small degree on Apple's iTunes Music Store's Complete My Album feature to convert them into full-album sales — in some cases with striking effectiveness."

It's been a while since I've said anything nice about the music industry, but kudos to the labels' promotion teams. This strategy takes advantage of an Apple feature in a way that benefits pretty much everybody: insatiable fans, who get to buy early singles confident they'll save money off the iTunes album release later; the acts, who don't have to be bound by the old, hidebound one-track-every-quarter release strategy; the labels, who protect their first-week album sales numbers; and Apple, of course.

Expect numerous superstar acts to try what we'll now refer to as "pulling a Weezy," dropping an array of early singles in the leadup to their albums' release dates. The Jonases are first—they'll prep fans for the mid-August release of A Little Bit Longer with, in order, "Pushing Me Away" on July 15, "Tonight" (no relation to the old New Kids hit, I guess) on July 29, and the title track on Aug. 5.

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses (Digital Songs chart includes total downloads/percentage change in parentheses):

Hot 100
1. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 1, 8 weeks)
2. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 16 weeks)
3. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 3, 20 weeks)
4. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 4, 12 weeks)
5. Jonas Brothers, "Burnin' Up" (CHART DEBUT)
6. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 6, 8 weeks)
7. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 8, 14 weeks)
8. Chris Brown, "Forever" (LW No. 7, 10 weeks)
9. Demi Lovato & Joe Jonas, "This Is Me" (LW No. 11, 2 weeks)
10. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 5, 20 weeks)

Hot Digital Songs
1. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 1, 204,000 downloads, -6%)
2. Jonas Brothers, "Burnin' Up" (CHART DEBUT, 183,000 downloads)
3. Demi Lovato & Joe Jonas, "This Is Me" (LW No. 2, 123,000 downloads, +7%)
4. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 3, 137,000 downloads, +7%)
5. Rihanna, "Disturbia" (LW No. 6, 112,000 downloads, +2%)
6. Miley Cyrus, "7 Things" (LW No. 4, 106,000 downloads, -19%)
7. The Pussycat Dolls, "When I Grow Up" (LW No. 5, 103,000 downloads, -20%)
8. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 8, 93,000 downloads, -15%)
9. Metro Station, "Shake It" (LW No. 10, 91,000 downloads, -11%)
10. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 9, 88,000 downloads, -13%)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (LW No. 1, 14 weeks)
2. Lil Wayne, "A Milli" (LW No. 4, 10 weeks)
3. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 3, 18 weeks)
4. The-Dream, "I Luv Your Girl" (LW No. 5, 18 weeks)
5. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (LW No. 6, 14 weeks)
6. Alicia Keys, "Teenage Love Affair" (LW No. 7, 20 weeks)
7. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 16 weeks)
8. Usher feat. Beyonce and Lil Wayne, "Love in This Club, Part II" (LW No. 8, 10 weeks)
9. Trey Songz, "Last Time" (LW No. 9, 22 weeks)
10. Young Jeezy feat. Kanye West, "Put On" (LW No. 10, 8 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. Montgomery Gentry, "Back When I Knew It All" (LW No. 3, 19 weeks)
2. Blake Shelton, "Home" (LW No. 2, 23 weeks)
3. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 1, 15 weeks)
4. Alan Jackson, "Good Time" (LW No. 5, 12 weeks)
5. Dierks Bentley, "Trying to Stop Your Leaving" (LW No. 7, 25 weeks)
6. Brooks & Dunn, "Put a Girl in It" (LW No. 9, 10 weeks)
7. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 4, 16 weeks)
8. Sugarland, "All I Want to Do" (LW No. 10, 6 weeks)
9. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 6, 19 weeks)
10. Keith Anderson, "I Still Miss You" (LW No. 12, 22 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 1, 11 weeks)
2. The Offspring, "Hammerhead" (LW No. 2, 8 weeks)
3. Foo Fighters, "Let It Die" (LW No. 3, 13 weeks)
4. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 4, 17 weeks)
5. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 5, 19 weeks)
6. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 6, 15 weeks)
7. Disturbed, "Inside the Fire" (LW No. 9, 14 weeks)
8. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 12, 4 weeks)
9. Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline" (LW No. 7, 10 weeks)
10. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 8, 13 weeks)

In the last two years, we've seen several impressive feats on Billboard's Hot 100 by Disney Channel-groomed pop acts, and this week, we see another.

Four songs from the Jonas Brothers vehicle Camp Rock, which premiered on the channel last week, debut within the Top 40. And separately, Miley Cyrus previews her first album unattached from the Hannah Montana brand—and quickly scores her second-ever Top 10 hit.

Dig below these impressive numbers, and it becomes apparent that this is not necessarily another short-lived High School Musical-style chart blip. One week into summer, teenpop may be launching one of its once-a-decade all-out assaults on the pop charts—the kind of siege that will make even you, person over 18, forcibly aware of these songs faster than you can say "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)."

Let's run down the five Top 40 debutantes. Cyrus' "7 Things," an odd rock/country-lite hybrid, shoots 60 spots to No. 10, powered by its release on iTunes, where it sells more than 100,000 downloads in its first full week on sale. That matches the Hot 100 peak of her biggest hit to date, "See You Again," which peaked at No. 10 two months ago.

Coming in at Nos. 11, 20, 30 and 33 are the four Camp Rock songs: respectively, the climactic power ballad by costars Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas, "This Is Me"; a Jonas Brothers rocker, "Play My Music"; a wounded solo ballad by Joe Jonas, "Gotta Find You"; and the full-cast singalong "We Rock." (Somehow, I doubt that.) All four are fueled exclusively by download sales, ranging from about 68,000 for "We Rock" to 135,000 for the Lovato-Jonas duet.

This is the fifth time in the last two and a half years that the Hot 100 has been slammed with a wave of tunes from a Disney Channel soundtrack. In February 2006, eight songs from cast members of the first High School Musical stormed the chart. Nine months later, seven songs credited to Cyrus' alter ego Hannah Montana materialized. Cyrus followed that up in July 2007 with a hybrid Hannah soundtrack and straight-up studio album; five songs from that project (one by Cyrus, four by "Hannah") hit the chart at once. Just over a month later, seven songs by assorted High School Musical 2 cast members hit the chart.

Virtually all of these 27 songs stayed on the charts for a week or two at most; you can expect this week's four-song Camp Rock sortie to be gone by mid-July. All scored virtually imperceptible airplay on any station that doesn't syndicate Radio Disney's programming (such feeds generally don't count toward the Hot 100). Basically, these songs got a massive hit of iTunes sales in week one; they debuted on the Hot 100 solely thanks to those sales points; they slacked off in sales within a couple of weeks (as rabid tweens moved on to buying the soundtrack CDs, or just plain moved on); and, still unsupported by any radio airplay, they fell off the chart.

However, what's made the last 12 months interesting for tweenpop is the emergence of some longer-lasting hits that worked their way up the chart the hard way. Cyrus's "See You Again" debuted last Christmas and peaked nearly five months later, a slow, steady, pretty traditional chart run; in addition to its 1.7 million cumulative song sales, it scored serious adult-radio play, peaking just outside the top 10 of the airplay-only chart. The Jonases haven't scored their first big crossover hit yet (wait), but of their four previous Hot 100 entries, three were Top 40 hits and had multiple-month chart runs. The biggest, "S.O.S.," peaked at No. 17 and stayed on the chart for more than five months; the second-biggest, the No. 25 ballad "When You Look Me in the Eyes," ran for two months and scored several weeks' worth of measurable adult-radio airplay.

In short, the last few months' activity feels like it could be the throat-clearing for a late-aughts mini-era of teenpop dominance, not unlike the mini-eras we experienced in the last two years of the '80s and '90s. The 1988-90 period was only really dominated by one act, New Kids on the Block, but I'm sure everyone reading this remembers teenpop's '90s ascent in the States, from terminal unhipness around 1996 to chart dominance by 1999. Halfway through '08, the signs of breakthrough are there: under-18s are drowning in the stuff, but mainstream radio program directors won't succumb until they finally have to. We're just waiting for that first Backstreet Boys-size smash to break things wide open.

Looks like we're about to get it: the top seller on iTunes as I type is the Jonas Brothers' "Burnin' Up," the leadoff single from their preordained blockbuster A Little Bit Longer. The digital track was just released at the end of last week and its sales haven't been reported yet, but it's a safe bet they'll be massive. A Top 10 debut on next week's Hot 100 is a near-lock.

I've been passively eyeing the Jonases over the past year and enjoying their output only moderately, but "Burnin'" is catchy as hell, with a lite-funk sound that's credibly compatible with mainstream radio. On pure pop stations, at least, the song is already making inroads: it ranks 51st on Billboard's Pop 100 Airplay list in its first week. After their brief Top 40 radio dalliance with "Eyes" this past winter, the JoBros might have finally delivered the hit that radio can't ignore—like it or not.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• Before we leave the topic of teenpop, I should mention that the comeback Kids are all right: "Summertime," by the now-manly New Kids on the Block, is three spaces away from the Top 40. Digital sales have held up since its debut—this week's 46,000-download total is the largest to date—and on pop stations, the song is nearing the top 20 in airplay. Next week, assuming a big Jonas debut, we could be looking at the new guard and old guard attacking the Top 40 at the same time. (Can someone get Hanson into a studio with some Swedish producers stat?)

• The second-biggest debut on the Hot 100, and the biggest not affiliated with Camp Rock, is Rihanna's "Disturbia" at No. 19. Like her short-lived chart-topper "Take a Bow" a month ago, the new tune (seemingly unrelated to movies starring Shia LaBeouf) is a bonus track from the fan-soaking rerelease of her most recent album. A clubby throwdown in the mode of "Don't Stop the Music," "Disturbia" in its debut week actually outsells "Bow" at iTunes. But "Bow" is belatedly blooming as a radio smash, which explains its higher Hot 100 position (No. 4). It's now the fourth most-played song at radio nationwide, as "Bow" gains traction at R&B radio along with Top 40; it's nearing the Top 20 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart.

All three bonus tracks on Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded have made splashy debuts on the Hot 100, but so far the underpeformer is Ri's duet with Maroon 5, "If I Never See Your Face Again," which has been knocking around mid-chart ever since its debut seven weeks ago; it falls two spots to No. 55 this week. The track could get a promotional boost from the mid-July debut of Maroon 5's own ripoff re-release, which will also include "Face."

• As if the Hot 100's new No. 1 single, Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl," weren't depressing enough, it also earns a singular chart distinction that means something to us hardcore chart geeks. According to Billboard chart-trivia god Fred Bronson, "Kissed" is the 1,000th No. 1 single of the Rock Era.

That is, according to what I call the "Bronson Method," which mixes the Hot 100, launched in 1958, with three years' worth of No. 1s from a predecessor chart.

When he launched his much-beloved Billboard Book of No. 1 Hits in 1985, Bronson codified a yardstick for measuring the Rock Era that persists to this day—beginning not with the recording of "Rocket 88" or the founding of Sun Records but with the chart success of Bill Haley and His Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" in 1955. Bronson didn't invent this starting line, of course (it had been in popular discourse for decades before), but he did use it to establish "Clock" as the first official Rock Era No. 1, counting up from there. Here, things get technical: for the early years before the Hot 100 launched, 1955 through 1958, Bronson relies on Billboard's then-dominant Best Sellers in Stores chart. This puts him slightly at odds with the other major chart historian and author, the legendary Joel Whitburn, whose Billboard reference books list numerous No. 1's from 1955 to 1958 that topped such long-gone lists as Most Played By Jockeys and Most Played in Jukeboxes.

If you count by Whitburn's multiple-charts method, Katy Perry's song is actually the 1,026th No. 1 of the Rock Era, and the 1,000th, Akon's "I Wanna Love You," came two years ago. If you count only No. 1s on the Hot 100, starting with the chart's launch in August 1958, Perry has the 961st.

Still, the Bronson Method persists for good reasons: it's simpler than any other method, it covers the generally undisputed entirety of the Rock Era, and it's been in a best-selling chart book (with friendly, large-type numbers in the corners of each page) for more than 20 years.

In his online column this week, Bronson lists the 10 songs that topped the chart at every 100-mark, starting with the 100th, 200th and so on up to Perry's 1,000th hit. (Her crapfest is the outlier; the other nine are mostly great songs, like "Paint It Black," "Maggie May," "Lovin' You" and "Like a Virgin.") To honor Bronson's method but ignore Perry's achievement, I prefer to list the songs that topped the chart at the triple-digits, up to last week's 999th No. 1—like so:

111: Ray Charles, "I Can't Stop Loving You" (1962)
222: Nancy and Frank Sinatra, "Somethin' Stupid" (1967)
333: Stevie Wonder, "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" (1973)
444: Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band, "A Fifth of Beethoven" (1976)
555: Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, "Ebony and Ivory" (1982)
666: U2, "With or Without You" (1987)
777: Surface, "The First Time" (1991)
888: Mariah Carey feat. Jay-Z, "Heartbreaker" (1999)
999: Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (2008)

Okay, it's not as great a list as Bronson's 100s. But at least it doesn't have any lurid girl-kissing in it.

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses (Digital Songs chart includes total downloads/percentage change in parentheses):

Hot 100
1. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 2, 7 weeks)
2. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 3, 15 weeks)
3. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 4, 19 weeks)
4. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 5, 11 weeks)
5. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 6, 19 weeks)
6. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 1, 7 weeks)
7. Chris Brown, "Forever" (LW No. 8, 9 weeks)
8. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 11, 13 weeks)
9. The Pussycat Dolls, "When I Grow Up" (LW No. 18, 4 weeks)
10. Miley Cyrus, "7 Things" (LW No. 70, 3 weeks)

Hot Digital Songs
1. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 2, 217,000 downloads, +0.4%)
2. Demi Lovato & Joe Jonas, "This Is Me" (CHART DEBUT, 135,000 downloads)
3. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 1, 127,000 downloads, -48%)
4. Miley Cyrus, "7 Things" (LW No. 48, 130,000 downloads, +402%)
5. The Pussycat Dolls, "When I Grow Up" (LW No. 11, 128,000 downloads, +71%)
6. Rihanna, "Disturbia" (CHART DEBUT, 111,000 downloads)
7. Jonas Brothers, "Play My Music" (CHART DEBUT, 109,000 downloads)
8. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 7, 107,000 downloads, +8%)
9. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 4, 102,000 downloads, -8%)
10. Metro Station, "Shake It" (LW No. 3, 103,000 downloads, -14%)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (LW No. 1, 13 weeks)
2. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 3, 15 weeks)
3. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 2, 17 weeks)
4. Lil Wayne, "A Milli" (LW No. 7, 9 weeks)
5. The-Dream, "I Luv Your Girl" (LW No. 4, 17 weeks)
6. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (LW No. 5, 13 weeks)
7. Alicia Keys, "Teenage Love Affair" (LW No. 6, 19 weeks)
8. Usher feat. Beyonce and Lil Wayne, "Love in This Club, Part II" (LW No. 8, 9 weeks)
9. Trey Songz, "Last Time" (LW No. 9, 21 weeks)
10. Young Jeezy feat. Kanye West, "Put On" (LW No. 17, 7 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 1, 14 weeks)
2. Blake Shelton, "Home" (LW No. 3, 22 weeks)
3. Montgomery Gentry, "Back When I Knew It All" (LW No. 6, 18 weeks)
4. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 2, 15 weeks)
5. Alan Jackson, "Good Time" (LW No. 7, 11 weeks)
6. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 4, 18 weeks)
7. Dierks Bentley, "Trying to Stop Your Leaving" (LW No. 8, 24 weeks)
8. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 5, 18 weeks)
9. Brooks & Dunn, "Put a Girl in It" (LW No. 10, 9 weeks)
10. Sugarland, "All I Want to Do" (LW No. 13, 5 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 1, 10 weeks)
2. The Offspring, "Hammerhead" (LW No. 2, 7 weeks)
3. Foo Fighters, "Let It Die" (LW No. 3, 12 weeks)
4. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 4, 16 weeks)
5. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 5, 18 weeks)
6. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 6, 14 weeks)
7. Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline" (LW No. 8, 9 weeks)
8. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 7, 12 weeks)
9. Disturbed, "Inside the Fire" (LW No. 9, 13 weeks)
10. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 10, 13 weeks)

EMI is the Bear Stearns of the music industry—once mighty, now declining rapidly and ripe for takeover and obliteration. But you'd never know it looking at the new Billboard Hot 100: two singles on EMI's U.S. flagship label, the 66-year-old Capitol Records, sit in the top two positions.

The chart is crowned by Coldplay's "Viva la Vida," the band's first-ever chart-topper and arguably the first No. 1 hit fueled entirely by Apple Inc. One lip-smack below them is Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl," which reaches No. 2—the latest leap in an inexorable march that will probably put her atop the chart before you fire up your July 4 barbecue.

Whether Perry ousts Chris Martin & co. from the penthouse next week or the week after will depend on the public's buying behavior this week, following the release of Coldplay's new blockbuster album. The interplay of song sales and album sales in the iTunes era is hard to predict—as shown by Lil Wayne's drop from No. 1, which we called wrong in a major way just last week.

Let's start with Capitol's victory. According to Billboard, the one-two punch of Coldplay and Perry marks the first time Capitol—that specific label, not any EMI/Capitol-distributed subsidiaries—has owned the Hot 100's Top Two since the first week of September 1967. You might guess that the Beatles were involved, and they were, but at No. 2. The gold medalist back then was Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe," which took over No. 1 from the Fabs' "All You Need Is Love." So: a coltish female and a best-selling British group—it's the same combo as this week, albeit in reverse order. (Let's hope history repeats and Perry never makes the Top 20 again, like Gentry, who deserved better.)

As for Coldplay, the title track from their new album remains the country's top-selling digital track for a third week, shifting roughly another quarter-million downloads. Until now, the song has been charting on the Hot 100 almost entirely from sales points, but radio finally joins the party; Billboard reports that the song is receiving top-20 airplay at a couple of niche formats, modern rock and adult top 40 (i.e., pop stations that appeal to your 30/40-something rugrat-raisers and Starbucks-drinkers). As a result, "Viva" makes its first appearance on the all-genre Hot 100 Airplay list, ranking as the 65th most-played song in the country.

Still, let's not kid ourselves: sales points are what made "Viva la Vida" a smash. And those sales have been exclusive to one store, iTunes. (As of this week, you can finally buy the song at Amazon, but those sales don't fall into the current chart's tracking week.) The million-plus iTunes purchases of "Viva" over the last month have been fueled almost entirely by the aggressively colorful Apple television commercial that's been running since late May.

For months, we've been watching the chart fortunes of the songs Apple chooses for its highest-profile iPod and Macintosh ads. Each has made a bigger splash than the last: from Feist's iPod nano-fueled hit last fall, which reached the Top 10; to Yael Naïm's MacBook Air-shilling smash this winter, which debuted in the Top 10. Now, Apple can claim its biggest win ever: a No. 1 hit it created virtually alone.

Am I overstating things? Sure, Coldplay is one of the world's biggest bands, and anything they release is bound to sell, Apple ad or no Apple ad.

But in the last month, we've had a nearly perfect, scientifically sound experiment: two simultaneous Coldplay singles with completely different promotional strategies. The first single, "Violet Hill," was released earlier and promoted aggressively to rock radio, and the band shot a Beatlesque music video, which has been receiving copious MTV play. The other single, "Viva," was released not long after "Violet," but it was promoted to radio later, and it did not receive any formal video treatment—except for Apple's TV ad.

In this accidental Pepsi Challenge, "Viva" has been the bigger hit by far, outselling "Violet" by as much as six to one. Apple can legitimately point to their ad as the X-factor: unlike "Violet," "Viva" has had little airplay, no video play and no other TV exposure except a taped performance on the MTV Movie Awards—which was two weeks ago and didn't seem to overwhelmingly help the song one way or another.

In short, any record executives rooting for a waning of Apple's influence over their industry have to look at this week's Hot 100 as very, very ominous news.

The only thing that will stop the Coldplay song's dominant chart run now is if fans decide to buy their album to the exclusion of their singles. You'd think I could make that prediction confidently. But I'm a little gun-shy this week, after I confidently—and wrongly—predicted in my last column that the owner of the next No. 1 album would also remain on top of the Hot 100.

It seemed like such a safe bet. We'd been talking about Lil Wayne's stunning, expected million-plus album sales for days. In the most triumphant week of his career, wouldn't it stand to reason that the all-around Weezy frenzy would keep the spring-dominating single "Lollipop" at No. 1 for another week?

You'd think that, but you'd be very wrong. "Lollipop" falls to No. 3 on the big chart, and that small move masks how seriously the song cratered. Digital sales of "Lollipop" in all its flavors—single version and album version, explicit and "clean"—drop, collectively, by more than a third from the week before (99,000 total downloads, down from 154,000). If not for radio airplay—"Lollipop" is still the most played song in the country—the song probably would've fallen out of the Top Five entirely. What happened?

Apparently, last week's singles-chart dominance by Weezy was just an amuse-bouche for the release of Tha Carter III. Once the album was available, fans sensibly decided that buying it was a sounder financial move than continuing to buy a half-dozen singles piecemeal. Simple economics, right?

Except, until recently, this hasn't been the trend. Back in November, I wrote in this column that, counterintuitively, "the release of an album seems to help, not hurt, already-rising songs whose release preceded their respective albums."

We had plenty of such evidence last fall. Alicia Keys reached No. 1 with "No One" the same week her album debuted with an impressive three-quarter-million in sales. Carrie Underwood saw her single "So Small" fly up the Hot 100 the same week her album debuted at No. 1. And how about the best Lil Wayne analogy of all: Kanye West, who debuted last September with 950,000 albums, nearly identical to Weezy's total; in that same week, his "Stronger" shot to No. 1 on the Hot 100. In all of these cases, the release of the album seemed to serve as fanfare to the buying public: hey! buy my album, or if you're too cheap, go to iTunes and download the first single.

Not this time. I have two theories about what's changed since last fall.

1. The cumulative effect of multiple singles. You don't release a half-dozen songs from an album, and score measurable airplay on all of them, without people deciding that album must be worth buying. Unlike Keys, Underwood and West, Weezy was too impatient to release just one leadoff single. Even if reviews for Tha Carter III have been a bit tepid, it's blindingly obvious that an album with six preordained hits must be worth a Hamilton. Which makes 99 cents for "Lollipop" seem like less of a deal.

2. The digital market still evolving—and becoming more album-friendly. The longer iTunes becomes entrenched as the nation's No. 1 music retailer, the more comfortable people get with the idea of buying song bundles there. The consumer who used to think, "digital is for singles, plastic is for albums" is probably coming around to the idea that albums can be digital, too. Never mind the fact that dozens of brick-and-mortar music stores have closed since last Christmas.

Which brings us back to Coldplay: both of the above trends apply to them. They have front-loaded the new album with two established hits, and they are megastars on iTunes. Early word has the album debuting with a record week of digital sales—they scored more than 140,000 downloads on the first day. By that rationale, sales of "Viva la Vida," the song, are sure to drop as fans devote their dollars to the full-length. Looking at the best-sellers on iTunes as of today, it's a little hard to tell (more than one version of the song is selling), but "Viva" does appear to be down overall.

If I were betting man, I'd lay money that the dreaded Perry will be No. 1 on the Hot 100 next week. But you didn't hear that from me.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• While we're discussing the ways in which I was wrong, let me highlight two other recent botched calls.

Perhaps injecting my bias a bit overmuch, last week I speculated that the Pussycat Dolls' new single, "When I Grow Up," would recede this week. After all, the song's big leap last week was the result of the MTV Movie Awards, and that show doesn't exactly have legs. Oh, how wrong I was: "Grow Up" springs forward 13 places to No. 18, spurred by a 16% rise in digital sales. I forgot what a force the Dolls have always been at iTunes, where hits like "Stickwitu" and "Buttons" generated top 10 sales for months on end in 2005 and 2006. So: well done, Interscope promotions. Fair play to Nicole and all that.

My other bad call came a little less than two months ago, when Chris Brown debuted at an impressive No. 9 with "Forever" and I speculated that the Rihanna-like club track had "already peaked." Color me blush: "Forever" returns to the Top 10 this week, at a new peak of No. 8. As I noted in early May, the song debuted entirely on sales to rabid Brown fans, but it was going to need airplay to maintain its lofty position. It took a while, but it's finally happening: "Forever" is now the 15th most-played song on the radio, and its sales have held up all this time—it returned to the digital-sales top 10 last week.

Don't worry, I'm sure I'll return to being overconfident and obnoxious in a week or two.

• How dominant is Kenny Chesney on the Country chart? Enough that his "Better as a Memory" ousted Carrie Underwood from the No. 1 spot after she spent just one week there. And here's the kicker: her "Last Name" scores a bullet from Billboard, meaning that it grew in chart points last week; Chesney's song just grew more. "Better" jumps to No. 1 from No. 4, overtaking Brad Paisley and Rascal Flatts in the process.

All four singles from Chesney's last album, September 2007's Just Who I Am, have reached the Top Two on the Country list. Actually, all made it to No. 1, except the George Strait duet "Shiftwork," which peaked at No. 2, strangely. (I mean: Chesney plus Strait—that's the closest thing to a No. 1 guarantee you can get.)

• I mention this as consolation to Maura: her pick for Summer Jam of '08, Lloyd's "Girls Around the World" featuring Lil Wayne, may be a meager pop hit (No. 72 on the Hot 100). But over on the R&B/Hip-Hop Songs list, it's outcharting Estelle and Tyga by a damn sight, rising four notches this week to No. 15. Since this is an airplay-dominated chart, I think we can safely predict "Girls" will be booming from many a Jeep as the mercury rises—as sure a sign of summeriness as we Americans have. Got me throwin' up my hands!

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses (Digital Songs chart includes total downloads/percentage change in parentheses):

Hot 100
1. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 2, 6 weeks)
2. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 4, 6 weeks)
3. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 14 weeks)
4. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 3, 18 weeks)
5. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 5, 10 weeks)
6. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 9, 18 weeks)
7. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 7, 24 weeks)
8. Chris Brown, "Forever" (LW No. 11, 8 weeks)
9. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 6, 18 weeks)
10. Metro Station, "Shake It" (LW No. 14, 11 weeks)

Hot Digital Songs
1. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 1, 244,000 downloads, -4%)
2. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 2, 216,000 downloads, +8%)
3. Metro Station, "Shake It" (LW No. 8, 120,000 downloads, +28%)
4. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 3, 111,000 downloads, -5%)
5. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 5, 109,000 downloads, -3%)
6. Chris Brown, "Forever" (LW No. 7, 105,000 downloads, +36%)
7. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 6, 94,000 downloads, -9%)
8. Jesse McCartney, "Leavin'" (LW No. 11, 88,000 downloads, +26%)
9. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 9, 78,000 downloads, -8%)
10. Pussycat Dolls, "When I Grow Up" (LW No. 12, 75,000 downloads, +16%)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (LW No. 1, 12 weeks)
2. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 3, 16 weeks)
3. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 14 weeks)
4. The-Dream, "I Luv Your Girl" (LW No. 5, 16 weeks)
5. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (LW No. 4, 12 weeks)
6. Alicia Keys, "Teenage Love Affair" (LW No. 6, 18 weeks)
7. Lil Wayne, "A Milli" (LW No. 11, 8 weeks)
8. Usher feat. Beyonce and Lil Wayne, "Love in This Club, Part II" (LW No. 7, 8 weeks)
9. Trey Songz, "Last Time" (LW No. 10, 20 weeks)
10. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 9, 19 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 4, 13 weeks)
2. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 1, 14 weeks)
3. Blake Shelton, "Home" (LW No. 5, 21 weeks)
4. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 2, 17 weeks)
5. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 3, 17 weeks)
6. Montgomery Gentry, "Back When I Knew It All" (LW No. 6, 17 weeks)
7. Alan Jackson, "Good Time" (LW No. 9, 10 weeks)
8. Dierks Bentley, "Trying to Stop Your Leaving" (LW No. 10, 23 weeks)
9. Lady Antebellum, "Love Don't Live Here" (LW No. 7, 37 weeks)
10. Brooks & Dunn, "Put a Girl in It" (LW No. 13, 8 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 1, 9 weeks)
2. The Offspring, "Hammerhead" (LW No. 2, 6 weeks)
3. Foo Fighters, "Let It Die" (LW No. 3, 11 weeks)
4. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 4, 15 weeks)
5. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 5, 17 weeks)
6. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 8, 13 weeks)
7. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 6, 11 weeks)
8. Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline" (LW No. 7, 8 weeks)
9. Disturbed, "Inside the Fire" (LW No. 11, 12 weeks)
10. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 9, 12 weeks)

Lil Wayne is expected to triumph on next week's album chart, but this week, he has locked up a remarkable percentage of the Hot 100 singles chart: seven songs, starting with his five-week No. 1 champ "Lollipop."

This is the second time in three weeks that a single artist has laid claim to nearly a tenth of the chart; the other recent chart dominator was American Idol winner David Cook, who scored a mind-blowing 11 Hot 100 hits at the end of May. But Cook's feat was short-lived—he was down to three songs last week and is down to only one this week.

What makes Lil Wayne's feat impressive is not only that he could keep most of these seven songs on the chart for several weeks yet. It's that, a little bit like all-time record-holder the Beatles, he earned it.

Two Lil Wayne songs debut on the Hot 100's lower rungs, joining the five that were on the chart last week. Here's the latest list of his hits, with their exact credits shown (note that every song except "A Milli" includes vocals by someone else):

No. 1: Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop"
No. 21: Lil Wayne feat. T-Pain, "Got Money"
No. 27: Usher feat. Beyonce and Lil Wayne, "Love in This Club Part II"
No. 29: Lil Wayne, "A Milli"
No. 79: Lloyd feat. Lil Wayne, "Girls Around the World"
No. 81: Lil Wayne featuring Juelz Santana and Fabolous, "You Ain't Got Nuthin"
No. 92: Lil Wayne featuring Jay-Z, "Mr. Carter"

All five of the Lil Wayne-fronted singles appear on Tha Carter III. But remember, that album's only been on sale since Tuesday, and the Hot 100 captures data on songs from the prior week. Except for "Lollipop," most of his Hot 100 chart points are coming from digital sales, which means he released all four of the other songs as digital singles at the same damn time.

This is highly irregular major-label-act behavior, even in the iTunes era: you release one single, maybe two, in the leadup to an album, and generally promote one song to radio at a time. In this case, the sensible thing would have been to let "Lollipop" run its course, then release the followup "Got Money" just as the former single was peaking and start working radio stations to score airplay on the new hit.

Screw that, this release strategy seems to say. He released "A Milli" on iTunes in April, while "Lollipop" was still on the rise. "Got Money," the T-Pain-supported "official" followup hit, dropped the last week of May. Just one week later, and only a week before the album dropped, he released both "You Ain't Got Nuthin" and "Mr. Carter."

This throw-it-all-out-there approach has been the M.O. for both Lil Wayne and Cash Money, his formerly independent label, for years now. But I must say it's admirable of distributing label Universal that it's apparently not fighting Weezy's irrepressible need to release a song with every moon phase. (Or it could be a sign that they've totally relinquished control.)

Maybe that's because the strategy is working, even at radio. Most of Weezy's Hot 100 points are coming from sales, but virtually all of these songs are getting airplay, too—almost all of it from black radio. On the radio-dominated Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart, Lil Wayne's name appears eight times—and half the songs he's attached to are in the Top 20 ("Lollipop," "Love in This Club," "A Milli," "Girls Around the World"). In fact, all of the Hot 100 songs shown above are receiving airplay except "You Ain't Got Nuthin." (The other two R&B/Hip-Hop charters: the six-month-old track from The Leak EP, "I'm Me"; and his supporting performance on Birdman's "I Run This.")

Right now on iTunes, in the wake of Tha Carter III's release, Lil Wayne dominates the store's best-selling tracks. Four versions of "Lollipop" are selling big; many of the above songs are still in the top 100; and there's yet another new song, "3 Peat." A week from now on the Hot 100, assuming none of his current hits drop off and "3 Peat" joins them, he could be even more dominant than he is now.

So where does all this place Lil Wayne in chart history?

When David Cook set the SoundScan-era record for Hot 100 dominance two weeks ago, Billboard chart columnist Fred Bronson fielded several grumbly letters from aging Boomers, who complained that comparing David Cook's 11 songs to the Beatles' 14 charters in April 1964 was a farce. To be fair to these thinly veiled Fabs fans, comparing chart phenomena in the modern era—with its whipsaw chart moves and instant-boom-and-bust singles—to the more regimented old-school charts is, shall we say, a bit fraught.

Still: you don't achieve what the Beatles, David Cook and Lil Wayne pulled off without something wonderfully weird going on. The fact is, all three acts have a rupture in the normal record-label release pattern to thank for their success. As Bronson explained in his column, the only reason the Fabs scored 14 simultaneous Hot 100 singles was the sheer number of labels releasing Beatles product before the group broke in the United States early in 1964; then, after their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, about a half-dozen tiny U.S. labels emptied their vaults of any Beatles-related tracks they'd been lucky enough to sign up.

In short, it was the combination of television and a series of contractual accidents resulting in a flood of songs—not unlike the combination of television and a weird contractual arrangement (iTunes' agreement to withhold Idol song-reporting until the show's final week) that propelled Cook's feat.

In fact, out of these three artists, Lil Wayne's feat looks the most traditional. One label let him release a slew of material all at once, and his rabid fans are buying and requesting virtually all of it. There's a word for that: popularity.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• When we last left the race for No. 1, two songs were closing in on "Lollipop": Coldplay's Apple-fueled "Viva La Vida" and Katy Perry's tackiness-fueled "I Kissed a Girl." Both contenders move up one notch this week, and their respective patterns persist. For Coldplay, it's all about the digital—selling only at iTunes, the track moved a quarter-million downloads, a jump from its already-stunning total the prior week. But the airplay picture is still developing—it's absent from the all-genre Hot 100 Airplay list, but it does debut on Modern Rock tracks at No. 33 (the bigger Coldplay hit at rock radio, "Violet Hill," remains in the Top 10). For Perry, sales are lower but still huge—up another 27,000 or so to nearly 200,000—and airplay is growing all the time. "Kissed" is now among the 40 most-played songs at radio nationwide.

It may all be moot next week: Lil Wayne, currently enjoying the biggest moment of his career, will likely hold onto No. 1 for another week as Carter-mania keeps "Lollipop" selling and playing everywhere. Two weeks from now, however, if Coldplay sees a similar burst of attention from the release of Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, the title track could make its final bid for the Hot 100 penthouse.

• The only chink in Weezy's armor this week: he no longer leads the R&B/Hip-Hop chart, as "Lollipop" is evicted from the top slot by the unstoppable Keyshia Cole. Just two weeks ago Billboard reported that Lil Wayne had one of the biggest leads in chart points for a No. 1 hit over the last couple of years. It's also a blow to Plies' Ne-Yo-backed "Bust It Baby," which had been holding at No. 2, waiting for Wayne to wane, and which Cole's "Heaven Sent" hops right over.

This is Cole's third consecutive R&B chart-topper, after "Let It Go" and "I Remember." Provocative topic for discussion: is Mary J. Blige handing over her hip-hop-soul crown? [Chart columnist ducks.]

• It took a bit longer than we expected, but Carrie Underwood finally tops Hot Country Songs with "Last Name." The girl-gone-wild, omigawd-what-have-I-done? tune takes a relatively big move from No. 5 to No. 1. After Underwood sang it on the May 21 American Idol finale in a leg-baring outfit, we expected country radio programmers to boost spins of the track, and it took a while, but here we are. This gives Underwood two consecutive albums with three No. 1 hits each. With just three years of recording history, she's become—no kidding—the 21st Century's biggest female country performer, beating the likes of Faith Hill, Jo Dee Messina and Sara Evans.

• After performing their comeback/let's-forget-Nicole's-solo-record-ever-happened hit on the MTV Movie Awards last week, the Pussycat Dolls "When I Grow Up" (which makes your columnist weep for the future) leaps 45 notches to No. 31 on the Hot 100. It's the biggest digital-sales gainer for the week, more than doubling its total to 64,000 downloads. That's a decent total, and enough to give the Dolls their sixth Top 40 hit overall—but other TV-fueled hits have performed far better this year. If I may start the schadenfreude party early, Scherzinger & co. shouldn't get too comfortable; the song isn't catching on at radio (yet) and will likely fall back next week.

• It's been a good year already for hip-hop comebacks, songs with Autotune, and supporting raps by Kanye West. So why shouldn't Young Jeezy jump on the bandwagon? The Hot 100's top debut this week is Jeezy's "Put On" featuring West, already a Top 40 hit with its No. 36 appearance. Looks like for 2008, Ayyyyyyyyy! has become AyyyeeeEEEeeoooowweeeeaaaayyyyy!

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses (Digital Songs chart includes total downloads/percentage change in parentheses):

Hot 100
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 13 weeks)
2. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 3, 5 weeks)
3. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 2, 17 weeks)
4. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 5, 5 weeks)
5. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 4, 9 weeks)
6. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 6, 17 weeks)
7. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 7, 23 weeks)
8. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 8, 19 weeks)
9. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 11, 17 weeks)
10. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 10, 12 weeks)

Hot Digital Songs
1. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 1, 253,000 downloads, +15%)
2. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 3, 199,000 downloads, +16%)
3. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 154,000 downloads, -20%)
4. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 3, 117,000 downloads, -6%)
5. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 8, 113,000 downloads, +3%)
6. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 7, 103,000 downloads, -5%)
7. Chris Brown, "Forever" (LW No. 12, 102,000 downloads, +36%)
8. Metro Station, "Shake It" (LW No. 15, 93,000 downloads, +52%)
9. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 9, 84,000 downloads, -10%)
10. David Cook, "The Time of My Life" (LW No. 4, 80,000 downloads, -51%)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (LW No. 3, 11 weeks)
2. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 13 weeks)
3. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 2, 15 weeks)
4. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (LW No. 4, 11 weeks)
5. The-Dream, "I Luv Your Girl" (LW No. 5, 15 weeks)
6. Alicia Keys, "Teenage Love Affair" (LW No. 8, 17 weeks)
7. Usher feat. Beyonce and Lil Wayne, "Love in This Club, Part II" (LW No. 9, 7 weeks)
8. Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You" (LW No. 6, 17 weeks)
9. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 7, 18 weeks)
10. Trey Songz, "Last Time" (LW No. 11, 19 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 5, 13 weeks)
2. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 1, 16 weeks)
3. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 2, 16 weeks)
4. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 6, 12 weeks)
5. Blake Shelton, "Home" (LW No. 8, 20 weeks)
6. Montgomery Gentry, "Back When I Knew It All" (LW No. 9, 16 weeks)
7. Lady Antebellum, "Love Don't Live Here" (LW No. 3, 36 weeks)
8. James Otto, "Just Got Started Lovin' You" (LW No. 7, 34 weeks)
9. Alan Jackson, "Good Time" (LW No. 10, 9 weeks)
10. Dierks Bentley, "Trying to Stop Your Leaving" (LW No. 12, 22 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 1, 8 weeks)
2. The Offspring, "Hammerhead" (LW No. 2, 5 weeks)
3. Foo Fighters, "Let It Die" (LW No. 5, 10 weeks)
4. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 6, 14 weeks)
5. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 3, 16 weeks)
6. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 4, 10 weeks)
7. Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline" (LW No. 7, 7 weeks)
8. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 8, 12 weeks)
9. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 10, 11 weeks)
10. Coldplay, "Violet Hill" (LW No. 9, 6 weeks)

If only Chris Martin were holding an iPhone 3G: then his band would be atop the charts.

As it stands, Coldplay's "Viva la Vida," fueled by Apple's latest saturation-play TV commercial for iTunes, makes a bid for the top of Billboard's Hot 100 and lands at No. 3. They storm Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" fortress armed with blockbuster digital sales and sparse radio airplay. If Steve Jobs' minions keep that sleek ad on the air a couple more weeks, Coldplay could yet see the summit.

And even if I were among the Coldplay-haters out there, I'd be rooting hard for Martin & co., because the next U.S. No. 1 single is either going to be theirs or Idolator's early pick for worst single of 2008.

By leaping into the top three, Coldplay score their biggest-ever U.S. hit, three years after "Speed of Sound" debuted and peaked at No. 8. Billboard chart columnist Fred Bronson notes that, as of last week, when "Viva" rose into the winners' circle, Coldplay became the first all-male U.K. band to score two Top 10 U.S. hits since Jesus Jones in 1991.

(Bonus points to the first commenter who can name the second Jesus Jones hit! Extra-double bonus if you can name the British girl group that scored multiple Top 10s more recently.)

Until the Viva la Vida album officially goes on sale, iTunes has an exclusive on legal downloads of "Viva la Vida" the single—unsurprisingly, given the Apple ad campaign. The song moves almost 220,000 buck-a-song downloads at iTunes, making it the week's top seller by a long shot (some 25,000 downloads over Lil Wayne). The band continues to work two singles simultaneously, but as with so many things in life, availability is trumped by publicity: the rock single release, "Violet Hill," is available at both iTunes and Amazon, but without the benefit of a heavily-played TV commercial, "Violet" moves 37,000 downloads, or about one-sixth the total of "Viva."

"Viva" is going to need to maintain that killer sales total, because its airplay as yet is anemic. It's nowhere to be found on the Hot 100 Airplay list. Top 40 stations haven't been enticed to play it yet, and even modern-rock stations, which do contribute points to the Hot 100, aren't playing it much, having already committed to the Top 10 Modern Rock hit "Violet Hill."

At this point, Weezy's "Lollipop" is clinging to the top rung, its fourth week there, thanks to inertia. His sales are impressively consistent week to week—as of late May, he's getting a boost from the release of the Kanye West remix—and he's had the most-played song at radio for five weeks now. As we say here all the time, you generally need both sales and airplay to top the Hot 100 and stay there.

Which is what makes Katy Perry's ghastly "I Kissed a Girl" such a formidable contender. It vaults 16 notches into the top five, and the boost comes from both your computer and your radio. On the digital side, sales more than doubled, ranking it third among buck-a-songs for the week. And on the airwaves, while it's still ranked below the 50 most-played songs at radio overall, "Kissed" is exploding at strictly Top 40 stations: up more than 1,100 spins in the last week alone, the biggest gainer at Z-Schlock broadcasters nationwide.

Double-barreled growth like that makes Perry the clear favorite to top the chart... eventually. But in the next couple of weeks, my money's on either Weezy holding tight ("Lollipop" has settled into that Flo Rida/"Low" phase—viral among kids, lazily overplayed by programmers) or Coldplay going the last mile. Unless she's got a TV appearance planned, Perry has no one-week catalyst boosting her in the next few weeks—just her blandly titillating TRL-bait video. Meanwhile, Coldplay is going to have at least one more catalyst, namely their June 17 album release. And Apple probably won't hold back on the iTunes ad in the meantime; if anything hurts that strategy now, it's the end of TV sweeps and the start of the low-rated summer season.

Maybe now's the time for Chris Martin to call in that Kanye favor?

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• Before we leave off discussing Lil Wayne, it should be said that he had a great week on the charts all around. After recording "Lollipop" as a virtual homage to the T-Pain sound without T-Pain, Wayne released an actual duet with the autotuning Floridian, "Got Money," and scores an instant No. 13 position for his trouble. The stellar debut by Wayne-n-Pain is thanks to first-week sales of more than 93,000 downloads. Looks like the setup for Tha Carter III is as primed as it's gonna get—no backing out now!

Billboard points out that, with this debut, Weezy now has four listings in the Top 40, three of which (this is the impressive part) are as a lead artist. "That's the most for a lead [rapper] since 50 Cent had three [on] May 7, 2005," Billboard notes. The other two hits are his own "A Milli," which reenters the Top 40 at No. 34; and his supporting credit on the Beyonce remix of Usher's "Love in This Club," which rises to No. 25.

Oh yeah, and "Lollipop" still rules the R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart; it probably doesn't hurt that airplay for the Kanye remix counts toward the song's overall chart points.

• It's hard to tell just by glancing at the Top 10 below, but the Modern Rock list is hotly competitive this week. Idolator rock-radio guru Al Shipley and I have occasionally discussed which times of year are biggest for rock airplay, and this week I think we have further evidence that summer is one of the biggest.

Every song in the Top 10 earns a bullet (Billboard's indicator of outsized points growth), but three songs move backwards even while bulleting—which means the songs that pushed them back are growing even faster. The backward movers are as follows. Seether's "Rise Above This" drops to No. 3, outgunned by the Offspring's "Hammerhead" at No. 2; the former rises 27% in airplay, but the aging SoCal punks beat them by posting a more than 140% airplay boost. (Yikes!) Also exploding in airplay by nearly as large a percentage is Foo Fighters' "Let It Die" at No. 5, which sends Linkin Park's "Given Up" back one to No. 6 despite nearly 60% airplay growth. Finally, the Raconteurs' three-month-old "Salute Your Solution" drops two spots to No. 10, despite growing nearly 40% in spins, because airplay for Death Cab at No. 8 and Coldplay at No. 9 each nearly double from the previous week.

• Live by iTunes, die by iTunes: one week after setting a slew of chart records, American Idol '08 winner David Cook sees three-fourths of his 11 chart hits instantly vaporized. The culprit isn't America's short attention span; it's that iTunes complied with the instructions of 19 Productions and pulled everything from the Store except Cook's winning song, "The Time of My Life." If anything, where that song's concerned, Cook looks pretty good this week—"Time" hangs onto the Top 10 (down six to No. 9), as his sales fall by 31%, an impressively small drop.

I can't explain why Cook's "Dream Big" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" are still on the chart—the former plummeting from No. 15 to No. 81, the latter from No. 22 to No. 85. They were pulled from iTunes last week along with everything else. One possibility, based on arcane digital-sales stuff I've read in Billboard: like many e-retailers, Apple might book and report some of its song sales late, after folks' credit cards are charged, in which case a few thousand sales might have fallen into the start of the next tracking week. But that's just a theory. In any case, by next week, Cook will be a one-hit pony.

• The most interesting development on this week's Hot Country chart is also the most depressing: the tyranny of Jessica Simpson's voice continues. Her first Nashville single, "Come on Over," debuts at an unimpeachable No. 41. According to Billboard, that's the biggest start for any new artist on the Country chart since it began using actual radio counts 18 years ago. I mean, is it a hot-young-blonde thing? I blame Carrie Underwood.

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses (Digital Songs chart includes total downloads/percentage change in parentheses):

Hot 100
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 12 weeks)
2. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 2, 16 weeks)
3. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 10, 4 weeks)
4. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 4, 8 weeks)
5. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 21, 4 weeks)
6. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 6, 16 weeks)
7. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 5, 22 weeks)
8. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 7, 18 weeks)
9. David Cook, "The Time of My Life" (LW No. 3, 2 weeks)
10. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 8, 11 weeks)

Hot Digital Songs
1. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 4, 219,000 downloads, +58%)
2. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 192,000 downloads, +18%)
3. Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl" (LW No. 13, 172,000 downloads, +111%)
4. David Cook, "The Time of My Life" (LW No. 1, 163,000 downloads, -31%)
5. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 3, 124,000 downloads, -14%)
6. Lil Wayne feat. T-Pain, "Got Money" (CHART DEBUT, 114,000 downloads)
7. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 5, 108,000 downloads, -12%)
8. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 6, 110,000 downloads, -4%)
9. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 8, 94,000 downloads, -4%)
10. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 12, 77,000 downloads, -9%)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 12 weeks)
2. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 2, 14 weeks)
3. Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (LW No. 3, 10 weeks)
4. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (LW No. 4, 10 weeks)
5. The-Dream, "I Luv Your Girl" (LW No. 7, 14 weeks)
6. Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You" (LW No. 6, 16 weeks)
7. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 5, 17 weeks)
8. Alicia Keys, "Teenage Love Affair" (LW No. 15, 16 weeks)
9. Usher feat. Beyonce and Lil Wayne, "Love in This Club, Part II" (LW No. 10, 6 weeks)
10. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 8, 13 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 1, 15 weeks)
2. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 4, 15 weeks)
3. Lady Antebellum, "Love Don't Live Here" (LW No. 5, 35 weeks)
4. Phil Vassar, "Love Is A Beautiful Thing" (LW No. 2, 301 weeks)
5. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 7, 12 weeks)
6. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 6, 11 weeks)
7. James Otto, "Just Got Started Lovin' You" (LW No. 3, 33 weeks)
8. Blake Shelton, "Home" (LW No. 8, 19 weeks)
9. Montgomery Gentry, "Back When I Knew It All" (LW No. 9, 15 weeks)
10. Alan Jackson, "Good Time" (LW No. 12, 8 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 1, 7 weeks)
2. The Offspring, "Hammerhead" (LW No. 3, 4 weeks)
3. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 2, 15 weeks)
4. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 4, 9 weeks)
5. Foo Fighters, "Let It Die" (LW No. 6, 9 weeks)
6. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 5, 13 weeks)
7. Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline" (LW No. 7, 6 weeks)
8. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 9, 11 weeks)
9. Coldplay, "Violet Hill" (LW No. 10, 5 weeks)
10. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 8, 10 weeks)

As I look at this week's charts, I recall a 1994 interview in which Paul McCartney assured the world that the highly anticipated, ultimately anticlimactic 1995 Beatles single "Free as a Bird" would have a "grungy" guitar sound.

As with so many things, Sir Paul was just ahead of his time—14 years later, one of the Fab Four's most cherished chart records would be nearly equaled by a dude who can make anything, even "Eleanor Rigby," sound like grunge.

That record is for most songs on the Billboard Hot 100 by a single act. It was set on April 11, 1964, by the Beatles, who were credited on 14 of that week's 100 songs. The Fabs still hold this record, for now.

But thanks to a confluence of chart-tabulation quirks, this week a former bartender from Missouri—who until now had never appeared on any Billboard chart—comes close to tying it, placing 11 songs on the Hot 100 all at once. In so doing, David Cook sets a new, blowout record for most debuts, comes within spitting distance of the Fabs' record, and generally makes the chart grungier than it's been since Paul gave that interview.

Just how big a deal is the arrival of American Idol's Season 7 winner on the charts? It's unprecedented on a number of levels, but many of the records it sets have to do with the way the charts are tabulated and in the way the Idol producers have chosen to release recordings this season. (The full list of best-selling tracks by Cook, along with those of his fellow Idol competitors, was run down by Maura yesterday.)

The most obvious impact is near the top of the Hot 100, where Cook's finale song, "The Time of My Life," debuts at No. 3. He's behind Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" and Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love," both of which have the advantage of months of radio airplay. Cook's hit is nearly airplay-free (a few stations likely played it on their morning shows, as a news item), and his chart position is entirely the result of his sales haul at iTunes, where "Time/Life" sold more than 236,000 downloads in the four days after the confetti came down.

A No. 3 debut is not that impressive in the annals of Idol finalists charting their schlock-and-rainbows finale songs. All of the Idol winners have debuted at No. 1 or No. 2 with their debut singles (with the exception of Jordin Sparks, who suffered a pitiful No. 15 peak for "This Is My Now" last year thanks to a botched digital release). Also, 236,000 copies puts "Time/Life" in the middle of the pack: slightly ahead of the first week for Taylor Hicks's "Do I Make You Proud" (228,000 copies, 2006), virtually tied with Kelly Clarkson's "A Moment Like This" (236,000, 2002) and a bit behind Ruben Studdard's "Flying Without Wings" (286,000, 2003).

Where Cook leaves all of his peers in the dust is the number of times his name appears on the chart. His 11 total debuts nearly doubles the all-time Hot 100 record of six debuts, set in November 2006 by Miley Cyrus in the first flush of Hannah Montana fame. Here's the full list of Cook's debuts—numbers below are the Hot 100 rank:

3. "Time Of My Life"
15. "Dream Big"
22. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"
28. "The World I Know"
42. "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing"
47. "Billie Jean"
67. "Always Be My Baby"
73. "Hello"
77. "The Music of the Night"
92. "Eleanor Rigby"
99. "I'm Alive"

Moreover, Cook's raw sales total is staggering. No other Idol finalist has sold this many copies of anything in a single week: 942,000 downloads, adding up all 17 of his best-sellers. That total would even beat the best album sales weeks by the likes of Clarkson or Carrie Underwood. (Hell, it beats the entire cumulative sales of the Taylor Hicks album.)

Fourteen of Cook's 17 tracks make Billboard's 75-position Hot Digital Songs chart—also a record on that four-year-old chart. (Full disclosure: SoundScan reports sales on up to 200 top downloads per week, so we have data on tracks that didn't make the chart—hence, 17 songs tabulated.)

Just for perspective, the best sales week for any Idol finalist's single came in 2003, when Clay Aiken's debut hit, "This Is the Night," sold 393,000 physical singles. Then again, Aiken, and every other finalist before 2008, had never had his or her entire Idol body of work released to the public before.

Basically, the chart records set this week are the fruit of a series of Idol firsts. It's the first year of Fox's and 19 Entertainment's promotional partnership with Apple, which made every song performed by the finalists available for sale. (We can only imagine what Fantasia's cover of "Summertime" would have sold the week after she performed it in 2004.) It's the first time Idol has made the winner's victory song available the same week it was performed; in the past there's been a gap of at least three or four weeks.

And finally, this is the first week all year that Fox and 19 have allowed Apple to report the sales of Idol songs to SoundScan and Billboard. With the competition over, and the producers' fears of tipping off the viewing public not an issue anymore, songs that have been selling in the tens of thousands for the last three months are suddenly allowed to chart. It's as if a boiling kettle that was held down is suddenly released and spews everywhere: the 14 Idol-related songs on this week's Hot 100—11 by Cook and three by runner-up David Archuleta—are a revue of the entire season.

Remember when Cook covered "Eleanor Rigby" during Beatles week or "I'm Alive" during Neil Diamond week? Well, someone did—each sold more than 25,000 downloads last week. (Cook's "Day Tripper" sold pretty well, too: take that, McCartney!) We'll never know how well these older recordings sold the first week they were performed on the show, but if this week is any indication, the totals have been staggering all season long. Also: this week's results, while clearly affected by the final vote, refute anyone (like me) who suspected all season that girlyman Archuleta was the big seller; for all we know, Cook's been thumping his fellow competitors all along. And finally, we have clear evidence that 2008 will not be a repeat of 2003, when the Idol winner (Studdard) was instantly and permanently outsold by his runner-up (Aiken).

Notwithstanding my Beatles quip at the top of this column, I doubt Cook will approach the Fabs' record or look anywhere near this mighty next week, when probably half or more of his "hits" will drop off the chart.

Longer-term, what this week does augur is that future Idol winners will have one week a year to set ever-crazier chart records. In its first five seasons, the show produced one chart-topping single each year, most of them No. 1 debuts—a rarity in an age when Billboard policy makes chart-topping debuts exceedingly difficult. But by 2009 or 2010, when an Idol winner debuts with, say, 15 or 20 songs in a single week, all those previous successes will look like child's play.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• In addition to its Hot 100 reign, Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" is sitting pretty on top of the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. In last week's Billboard, a R&B/Hip-Hop chart sidebar noted that the gap in chart points between Nos. 1 and 2 on that list is the largest it's been in a couple of years. That's bad news for the runner-up single, Plies' "Bust It Baby" with Ne-Yo, which holds at No. 2 after a big move into the runner-up slot last week. Plies' song has a bullet this week, while Weezy loses his, but "Lollipop" has such a massive lead that Plies still has a long distance to travel to overtake it.

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs is essentially an airplay chart—digital sales are not a factor, and physical sales are negligible—and "Lollipop" seems to have overtaken black-radio playlists nationwide. Frankly, for a rap hit, "Lollipop" is so mellow and smooth (if lewd) that it's probably palatable for some of the older-leaning, R&B-centric stations (your KISS-FM's as opposed to your Hot 97's) that make up a large chunk of the airplay base. Bottom line, even if "Lollipop" succumbs on the Hot 100 in the next couple of weeks, Weezy should be able to hold the penthouse on this chart well into June.

• Like my man Anthony, I'm almost ashamed to admit how seduced I am by Apple's latest iPod/iTunes commercial starring EMI saviors Coldplay. (The editing and art direction are just unreal; man, this is why I bought an HDTV.) Apparently the rest of America's been wooed, too: one week after it debuted on the tube, "Viva la Vida," the track featured in the ad, does a total 180° on the Hot 100, swerving from No. 15 two weeks ago to No. 41 last week and back up to a new peak of No. 10. On iTunes, sales more than double to almost 140,000 copies, making it the third-best-seller of the week after Cook's Idol track and Rihanna's "Take a Bow."

As tipped here two weeks ago, EMI and Coldplay continue to pursue a dual-track promotional strategy, hyping "Viva" via TV and pop radio and the (ahem) edgier "Violet Hill" to rock radio. The latter moved into the Modern Rock Top 10 last week and holds at No. 10 this week; "Violet"'s digital sales are about one-fourth those for "Vida."

• Note to my editor: you're not gonna like this. Katy Perry's kinda-evil "I Kissed a Girl" (why, Dr. Luke, why?!) is an emerging smash. In just three weeks on the Hot 100, it's shot from No. 76 to No. 40 to No. 21. And unlike almost every other emerging hit we've discussed in this week's column, Perry has radio on her side: "Kissed" debuts on Hot 100 airplay at, swear to God, No. 69. Besides being a groan-worthy double-entendre, that ranking means Perry is clearly on an upward trajectory, as she's got both iTunes (82,000 downloads this week, the 13th biggest seller) and your local Top 40 crapmerchant working for her.

Ah, well—look on the bright side: maybe this means Perry is going to fill this summer's tween slot, instead of Fergie.

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses (Digital Songs chart includes total downloads/percentage change in parentheses):

Hot 100
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 11 weeks)
2. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 1, 15 weeks)
3. David Cook, "The Time of My Life" (CHART DEBUT, 1 week)
4. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 3, 7 weeks)
5. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 5, 21 weeks)
6. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 4, 15 weeks)
7. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 6, 17 weeks)
8. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 7, 10 weeks)
9. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 8, 15 weeks)
10. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 41, 3 weeks)

Hot Digital Songs
1. David Cook, "The Time of My Life" (CHART DEBUT, 236,000 downloads)
2. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 3, 163,000 downloads, +16%)
3. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 1, 144,000 downloads, -27%)
4. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (LW No. 14, 139,000 downloads, +149%)
5. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 2, 122,000 downloads, -13%)
6. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 4, 115,000 downloads, -12%)
7. David Cook, "Dream Big" (CHART DEBUT, 111,000 downloads)
8. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 5, 98,000 downloads, -13%)
9. David Cook, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" (CHART DEBUT, 98,000 downloads)
10. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 7, 82,000 downloads, -5%)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 11 weeks)
2. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 2, 13 weeks)
3. Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (LW No. 3, 9 weeks)
4. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (LW No. 7, 9 weeks)
5. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 8, 16 weeks)
6. Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You" (LW No. 6, 15 weeks)
7. The-Dream, "I Luv Your Girl" (LW No. 12, 13 weeks)
8. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 4, 12 weeks)
9. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 5, 16 weeks)
10. Usher feat. Beyonce and Lil Wayne, "Love in This Club, Part II" (LW No. 10, 5 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 1, 14 weeks)
2. Phil Vassar, "Love Is A Beautiful Thing" (LW No. 2, 30 weeks)
3. James Otto, "Just Got Started Lovin' You" (LW No. 3, 32 weeks)
4. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 4, 14 weeks)
5. Lady Antebellum, "Love Don't Live Here" (LW No. 5, 34 weeks)
6. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 8, 10 weeks)
7. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 7, 11 weeks)
8. Blake Shelton, "Home" (LW No. 11, 18 weeks)
9. Montgomery Gentry, "Back When I Knew It All" (LW No. 10, 14 weeks)
10. George Strait, "I Saw God Today" (LW No. 6, 16 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 1, 6 weeks)
2. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 2, 14 weeks)
3. The Offspring, "Hammerhead" (LW No. 4, 3 weeks)
4. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 3, 8 weeks)
5. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 5, 12 weeks)
6. Foo Fighters, "Let It Die" (LW No. 7, 8 weeks)
7. Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline" (LW No. 6, 5 weeks)
8. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 8, 9 weeks)
9. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 9, 10 weeks)
10. Coldplay, "Violet Hill" (LW No. 10, 4 weeks)

Last week I poured cold water on the chart comeback of New Kids on the Block, who appeared on Billboard's less-heralded Pop 100 chart but remained M.I.A. on the all-genre Hot 100.

But I snarked too soon. This week, Danny, Donny Joey, Jon and Jordan have the week's highest Hot 100 debut with "Summertime," their un-Jazzy Jeff-related bid for postmillennial Top 40 radio. By debuting at No. 57, "Summertime" breaks a 14-year drought for NKOTB, who last made the middle rungs on the big chart with 1994's "Dirty Dawg."

It's poetic that the ur-boy band of the modern-pop era resurfaces the very same week boy-band impresario Lou Pearlman gets thrown in the clink. After all, 1994 was pretty much the moment when Pearlman began dreaming of rejiggering the five-boy New Kids template, launching the Backstreet-*N Sync era that entrenched the boy band in pop lore.

It's like a passing-back of the baton, from one pop era to its forbear. Not that I'd accept anything baton-shaped from Lou Pearlman...

Say what you want about teen screamers-turned-soccer moms, they're loyal—or at least, willing to part with 99 cents. The spur for the Kids' chart appearance is iTunes, where "Summertime" made its debut last week and toted nearly 39,000 downloads.

That's a respectable total for an act that's been out of the limelight for a decade and a half. But it probably satisfies the entire first wave of NKOTB's hardcore fanbase. (Imagine, if you can, the existence in 2008 of a hardcore New Kids fan.) If "Summertime" is going to move up the chart from here, it's going to need to sell to the moms' daughters, which means it's going to need radio airplay. It's nowhere to be found on the all-genre Hot 100 Airplay list, but Billboard reports that the track has made "a strong start at Top 40 radio"; on the magazine's list that's limited to pop-radio airplay only, "Summertime" is already ranked 35th among the most-played songs.

The bad news for the Kids is that, at least for now, they've shot their wad on major-market appearances that might goose sales or inspire radio programmers. The aforementioned 39K downloads includes sales tallied during the week of their incompetent but warmly received Today show appearance, as well as the height of New York-based frenzy surrounding radio station Z100's Zootopia concert last Saturday.

Still: if the last two decades of pop history are any indication, the last two years of a decade are ripe for a pure-pop comeback on the charts. New Kids owned that space in the early years of Bush, Sr.; whether they're destined for a lasting comeback in the waning days of Bush fils will largely depend on luck.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• We've had a string of fairly rare occurrences in the Hot 100's top slot lately. Three weeks ago we saw a Leona Lewis song enter the penthouse a third time after falling out twice—the first time that's happened in three decades. Last week we saw Rihanna leap 52 notches into pole position, the second-largest such leap ever. And now, a somewhat less rare but still oddball phenomenon: Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" sneaks back into the top slot after a three-week pause. That's the largest such gap since Usher floated out of and, after four weeks, back into No. 1 in early 2002 with "U Got It Bad."

Weezy sneaks back into the penthouse thanks to consistency. His 143,000-download total is solid but not spectacular, but he's the only act in the Top Five to see his sales decline by single-digit percentages each week over the last month. Compare him to recently ruling divas Lewis and Rihanna: the former's sales yo-yo up and down week to week (up 28% one week in late April, down 24% a couple of weeks later), and the latter followed last week's explosive sales debut with a 27% swoon this week.

The bottom line: after several weeks of exciting turnover in March and April, the upper reaches of the chart are sleepy again—so sleepy that our man Matos interviewed his peeps for another hilarious Billboard Top 10 review session, using last week's chart, and all 10 of those songs are still in the winners' circle. (Man, can somebody get Matos' sister Brittany over to some radio programmers' offices? She'd call them "illiterate" and insist they stop playing Usher and Young Jeezy on pain of withering shame.)

• On the Hot Country chart, two blonde reality-TV veterans with sin-drenched current singles each have a pretty good week—with the promise of a better one next week. Carrie Underwood's floozy confessional "Last Name," which had been stalled at the bottom of the Top 10 for about a month, finally catches fire again, slinking up three spots to No. 7. And Miranda Lambert's heat-packing "Gunpowder and Lead" inches up two more spots to No. 18, looking to become her biggest-ever country radio hit (she's four notches shy of the peak by 2007's "Famous in a Small Town").

What the two gals have in common is great recent TV exposure that won't be reflected until next week's charts. Underwood just performed "Last Name" on the American Idol finale two nights ago, and while her inevitable iTunes boost won't affect this chart, I'll be shocked if Idol-savvy country programmers don't boost its airplay. As for Lambert, her CMA triumph this past Sunday, winning the marquee Album of the Year trophy, might finally give radio the excuse it's been waiting for to put her into power rotation.

• Talk about filling a market gap: "Hallelujah" by Kate Voegele debuts at No. 68, on the strength of 37,000 downloads. All of those sales were presumably at iTunes, because Voegele's cover of the Leonard Cohen tune is an Apple-exclusive bonus track on her most recent album. (The iTunes bonus is ironic, because Voegele is signed to the Interscope-distributed MySpace Records.)

As we reported here months ago, Jason Castro's performance of "Hallelujah" on American Idol spurred hundreds of thousands of iTunes downloads of Jeff Buckley's angelic 1994 cover of the song, the obvious model for Castro's performance. But neither Buckley's nor Castro's versions of "Hallelujah" were eligible for the Hot 100—the former is too old, and sales of the latter weren't reported to Billboard for charting purposes. Voegele's cover, however, is fully Hot 100-eligible, hence its debut. The shocker: this is the first version of "Hallelujah" ever to appear on the Hot 100.

A repeat performance of the song by Castro on the Idol finale this week is going to boost anything "Hallelujah"-related, but apparently most of the people who wanted the Buckley version bought it after Castro's first performance in March. As of today, Voegele is beating Buckley on iTunes: his cover is ranked 77th among Apple's top-selling songs, and Voegele's is ranked 67th.

• One last Idol-related item: we could see some huge chart debuts on the Hot 100 next week. I don't have the full story at press time, but apparently iTunes and the Idol producers have decided to open the floodgates to the finalists' songs now that the contest is over—you can not only buy them (as you could all season), but their sales are being publicly reported for the first time. Check out the store's top sellers as of today: David Cook has the top four songs, with "The Time of My Life" (his gooey finale song), "Dream Big" (his Tuesday pick among the schlocky songwriting candidates), his U2 cover, and his Collective Soul cover. Also in the iTunes top 20: three David Archuleta songs.

God only knows how many copies each of these tracks is selling, but if all interested parties and Billboard collectively decide these recordings are chart-eligible, the Top 10 could look wildly different and even Beatles-like next week.

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses:

Hot 100
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 3, 10 weeks)
2. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 2, 14 weeks)
3. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 1, 6 weeks)
4. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 5, 14 weeks)
5. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 4, 20 weeks)
6. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 6, 16 weeks)
7. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 7, 9 weeks)
8. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 9, 14 weeks)
9. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 8, 14 weeks)
10. Danity Kane, "Damaged" (LW No. 10, 10 weeks)

Hot Digital Songs
1. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 1, 196,000 downloads, -27%)
2. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 2, 143,000 downloads, -13%)
3. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 3, 143,000 downloads, -8%)
4. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 4, 131,000 downloads, -1%)
5. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 5, 120,000 downloads, -6%)
6. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 8, 88,000 downloads, +2%)
7. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 7, 85,000 downloads, -9%)
8. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 9, 78,000 downloads, -10%)
9. Jesse McCartney, "Leavin'" (LW No. 10, 77,000 downloads, -10%)
10. John Mayer, "Say" (LW No. 11, 67,000 downloads, -5%)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 10 weeks)
2. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 6, 12 weeks)
3. Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (LW No. 8, 8 weeks)
4. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 5, 11 weeks)
5. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 2, 15 weeks)
6. Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You" (LW No. 3, 14 weeks)
7. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (LW No. 10, 8 weeks)
8. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 4, 15 weeks)
9. Trey Songz, "Last Time" (LW No. 9, 16 weeks)
10. Usher feat. Beyonce and Lil Wayne, "Love in This Club, Part II" (LW No. 12, 4 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 2, 13 weeks)
2. Phil Vassar, "Love Is A Beautiful Thing" (LW No. 3, 29 weeks)
3. James Otto, "Just Got Started Lovin' You" (LW No. 1, 31 weeks)
4. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 6, 13 weeks)
5. Lady Antebellum, "Love Don't Live Here" (LW No. 8, 33 weeks)
6. George Strait, "I Saw God Today" (LW No. 5, 15 weeks)
7. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 10, 10 weeks)
8. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 9, 9 weeks)
9. Taylor Swift, "Picture to Burn" (LW No. 4, 19 weeks)
10. Montgomery Gentry, "Back When I Knew It All" (LW No. 11, 13 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 1, 5 weeks)
2. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 2, 13 weeks)
3. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 3, 7 weeks)
4. The Offspring, "Hammerhead" (LW No. 5, 2 weeks)
5. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 8, 11 weeks)
6. Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline" (LW No. 10, 4 weeks)
7. Foo Fighters, "Let It Die" (LW No. 11, 7 weeks)
8. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 6, 8 weeks)
9. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 9, 9 weeks)
10. Coldplay, "Violet Hill" (LW No. 14, 3 weeks)

In 1988, I was a high-school junior and dweeby pop fan (only half of that has changed) madly in love with Pet Shop Boys' cover of the Brenda Lee/Elvis Presley chestnut "Always on My Mind," which was flying up Billboard's Hot 100. The single was a happy accident for EMI, the result of the Boys agreeing to perform on a U.K. telly special commemorating the 10th anniversary of the King's death. PSB's sophomore album Actually had been out for months and already spun off two massive transatlantic hits, "It's a Sin" and "What Have I Done to Deserve This?"; "Always on My Mind" appeared too late to make the album.

Lucky me, I hadn't purchased the Actually CD yet, and that spring EMI gave me a great deal: they re-released the CD with the "Always" single bundled with it. In either a touching sign of fidelity to album integrity or total laziness, they didn't re-press Actually; instead they bundled an "Always" CD-single into the other side of the longbox. I pitied the fools who'd bought Actually in the first six months it was on shelves.

Exactly 20 years later, this haphazard approach to garnering hit singles late in an album's life cycle has become a viable strategy for an industry desperate to win the pop fan's dollar by any means necessary. And this week, it produces an eye-popping chart move by Rihanna, whose "Take a Bow" takes over the Hot 100's top slot.

First, let's talk about Ri-Ri's achievement. "Take a Bow"—which I like to think of as either a musical version of Eddie Murphy's Raw routine about men cheating, or a cleaner version of "Smell Yo Dick"—hurtles from No. 53 to No. 1. (It's also the second song to top the Hot 100 with that title, including Madonna's 1994 snoozy-ballad smash.)

This 52-place move is the second-largest leap to No. 1 ever, after Maroon 5's 63-space jump with "Makes Me Wonder" last May, and it's thanks entirely to "Bow's" release on iTunes last week. In its first week on Apple's virtual shelf, the song sells a phenomenal 267,000 buck-a-song downloads: one of the three biggest totals ever for a digital single in its debut week, after Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body" just six weeks ago (286,000 copies) and her own "Umbrella" last May (277,000 copies).

Depending on how big a stickler you are, "Take a Bow" is either the fifth Top 20 hit from Rihanna's year-old Good Girl Gone Bad album or a standalone hit in its own right. Island Def Jam would rather you think of it the former way, because they plan to rerelease the album in June as Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded with "Bow" tacked onto it.

As we've discussed here at Idolator many, many times before, this trend toward "special edition" re-releases of year-old albums is an insult to the hardcore fan and a shameless grab for more revenue on already-established hit albums. But it's really just a more overt manifestation of something the industry's been wrestling with the entire Rock Era: how best to profit from a hit single.

In the '60s, when singles were actually moneymakers in their own right and albums were an afterthought, the labels treated albums far more shabbily than they do today, reshuffling song lineups without artists' permission based on whatever was on the radio that month. After all, what is the U.S. album Meet the Beatles! but a revised version of the U.K. With the Beatles album with "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There" tacked onto it? Often, Motown would even retitle an album after a hit when it emerged late in the album's life. Originally released as In the Groove, Marvin Gaye's 1968 LP was reissued as I Heard It Through the Grapevine!, complete with new cover art and superfluous exclamation point, once that immortal song became a smash; the track listing was the same, however.

Indeed, one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the '60s is now known largely in its hit-fortified reissued edition. The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle was first released in the spring of 1968, flopped, then re-released a year later with the hit single "Time of the Season" tacked onto it—a great but incongruous song appended to what had been a coherent suite of baroque pop tunes. [Redacted, as per comments below. Apologies—my memory and flimsy online research led me astray on this point.]

My Pet Shop Boys example from '88 arguably comes at the end of a two-decade period when the album was dominant and, by and large, untouchable—no label would dream of reissuing a big rock album from the '70s or early '80s with a single stripped onto it. Hell, even pop acts' albums in this period were largely untouched: if Madonna's Like a Virgin had been released in 2004 instead of 1984, Sire surely would have re-released it six months later with the non-album hits "Crazy for You" and "Into the Groove" tacked onto it. When XTC's classic 1987 album Skylarking was reissued with the fluke alternative-radio hit "Dear God" added to it, it was considered extraordinarily rare.

The mid-'80s creation of the compact disc and the growth of the cassette—each with longer running times than the LP—encouraged labels to add bonus tracks to CD and tape, but these were never pushed as singles. (Michael Jackson came closest in 1988, when the CD-only "Leave Me Alone" was promoted to MTV but not the radio.) Throughout the '90s, the labels reissued tons of classic LPs on CD with singles and other ephemera tacked on; but these were not current albums. That only began to change around 2000, starting with the likes of Christina Aguilera, reissued at its height with better radio mixes; and Jennifer Lopez, who fully rerecorded hits like "I'm Real" with rappers and then re-released 2001's J. Lo to include them.

The current "special edition" strategy came of age in 2004, when the already-hot Usher, already three No. 1 singles deep into Confessions, recorded "My Boo" with Alicia Keys and re-released the album with a fourth No. 1 single locked down. Since then, we've seen Mariah Carey, Shakira, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, and a score of other hit acts reissue their albums with new, chart-bound singles on them.

What's unprecedented about the last half-decade of hits isn't just the addition of hits to still-charting albums but, to put it bluntly, the premeditation. These new hit songs aren't flukes or accidents, they're planned. It's the Hollywood strategy of multiple DVD releases of the same movie ("Special Edition," "Remastered Edition," "Too Hot For TV! Edition," "Double-Gold Elite Edition," "Just Pay For This Again, Please, Edition" etc.), adapted for the music industry.

Before the creation of iTunes, this would have been an especially offensive, fan-soaking way to score a new hit. But now, the labels can claim innocence to the complaining fan, because the hit-bound bonus tracks are available—often even before the re-released album comes out—for 99 cents. When an act is already hot, the digital sales bump for a new song is inevitably massive, sending it flying up the charts. In four of the last five years, one No. 1 single per year was an add-on to an already extant album: the aforementioned "My Boo," Carey's "Don't Forget About Us," Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" and now "Take a Bow."

It's a neat trick, a way to storm the album chart and the singles charts at the same time: diehard fans have to have the new version of the album, if only for the new cover art; and more casual fans can download the new single inexpensively, producing a digital smash. In an era of ever-declining sales, you can expect the industry to keep "refreshing" hit albums—what few they have left—until the CD itself is a total nonentity.

Oh, and finally: We might see the next special-edition hit before the summer even starts. The same week she tops the chart, Rihanna debuts with Maroon 5 on a new version of their song "If I Never See Your Face Again," from a forthcoming special edition of Maroon 5's last CD. Expect it to shoot into the Top 40 in a week or two.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• Coldplay have the top two debuts on the chart this week, the result of the band's odd strategy of releasing two singles simultaneously through different channels. Both songs materialize within the Top 40.

"Violet Hill," the first single from Coldplay's new album, was first made available to fans as a free download in late April; those downloads were not formally tracked and, hence, had no effect on the Billboard charts. But a week later, the song was put on sale at iTunes, and the second single, "Viva la Vida," was released a day later.

The result: "Viva," which had never been available in any form prior to last week, makes the higher Hot 100 debut, all the way up at No. 15, with sales of more than 100,000 downloads. Meanwhile, "Violet," which the diehards had already scored for free, debuts at No. 40, with more modest sales of about 44,000.

The real shocker: who are the 44,000 people who paid for "Violet Hill" a week after it was offered for free?!

• The R&B/Hip-Hop Top 10 is juicier than usual this week, with three songs entering and a weird rebound by Mariah Carey. Her "Touch My Body" returns to No. 2, knocking back Ashanti's "The Way That I Love You," which seemed poised to hit No. 1. So much for that comeback! A bit lower down, Keyshia Cole replaces herself in the winners' circle, as her massive chart-topper "I Remember" falls out to make way for the followup, "Heaven Sent," up 10 big places to No. 8. She's going to have a hard time playing that wronged-woman card on future hits; Cole has become one of R&B's most reliable hitmakers.

• Alert Maura: New Kids are back on the charts! Well, not the Hot 100, but rather the Pop 100, a Top 40-centric chart Billboard uses to track a narrower slice of the radio audience. The erstwhile NKOTB debut on this less-heralded chart with "Summertime" at No. 81.

As Fred Bronson points out in his weekly Billboard column, the Kids will have to cross over to the actual Hot 100 to break a 14-year dry spell there; they last appeared on the big chart with 1994's (I wish I were kidding about this title) "Dirty Dawg."

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses (Digital Songs chart includes total downloads in parentheses):

Hot 100
1. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (LW No. 53, 5 weeks)
2. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 1, 13 weeks)
3. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 9 weeks)
4. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 3, 19 weeks)
5. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 4, 13 weeks)
6. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 5, 15 weeks)
7. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 6, 8 weeks)
8. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 7, 13 weeks)
9. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 8, 13 weeks)
10. Danity Kane, "Damaged" (LW No. 11, 9 weeks)

Hot Digital Songs
1. Rihanna, "Take a Bow" (CHART DEBUT, 267,000 downloads)
2. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 1, 162,000 downloads)
3. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 150,000 downloads)
4. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 4, 132,000 downloads)
5. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 3, 118,000 downloads)
6. Coldplay, "Viva La Vida" (CHART DEBUT, 101,000 downloads)
7. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 5, 93,000 downloads)
8. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 8, 87,000 downloads)
9. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 6, 86,000 downloads)
10. Jesse McCartney, "Leavin'" (LW No. 7, 83,000 downloads)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 9 weeks)
2. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 4, 14 weeks)
3. Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You" (LW No. 2, 13 weeks)
4. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 3, 14 weeks)
5. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 5, 10 weeks)
6. Plies feat. Ne-Yo, "Bust It Baby (Part 2)" (LW No. 7, 11 weeks)
7. Rick Ross feat. T-Pain, "The Boss" (LW No. 6, 18 weeks)
8. Keyshia Cole, "Heaven Sent" (LW No. 18, 7 weeks)
9. Trey Songz, "Last Time" (LW No. 12, 15 weeks)
10. Chris Brown, "Take You Down" (LW No. 16, 7 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. James Otto, "Just Got Started Lovin' You" (LW No. 1, 30 weeks)
2. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 5, 12 weeks)
3. Phil Vassar, "Love Is A Beautiful Thing" (LW No. 6, 28 weeks)
4. Taylor Swift, "Picture to Burn" (LW No. 3, 18 weeks)
5. George Strait, "I Saw God Today" (LW No. 2, 14 weeks)
6. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 7, 12 weeks)
7. Trace Adkins, "You're Gonna Miss This" (LW No. 4, 23 weeks)
8. Lady Antebellum, "Love Don't Live Here" (LW No. 8, 32 weeks)
9. Kenny Chesney, "Better as a Memory" (LW No. 9, 8 weeks)
10. Carrie Underwood, "Last Name" (LW No. 10, 9 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Weezer, "Pork & Beans" (LW No. 1, 4 weeks)
2. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 2, 12 weeks)
3. Flobots, "Handlebars" (LW No. 3, 6 weeks)
4. Atreyu, "Falling Down" (LW No. 5, 16 weeks)
5. The Offspring, "Hammerhead" (CHART DEBUT, 1 week)
6. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 6, 7 weeks)
7. Puddle of Mudd, "Psycho" (LW No. 4, 28 weeks)
8. Linkin Park, "Given Up" (LW No. 7, 10 weeks)
9. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 8, 8 weeks)
10. Nine Inch Nails, "Discipline" (LW No. 15, 3 weeks)

The upper reaches of this week's Billboard Hot 100 are a little sleepy—two songs sneak into the bottom rungs of the Top 10, and every song above them either holds position or moves at most a spot or two.

But one of the Top 10 entrants boasts an unusual pair of credits: he has his first Top 10 hit as a recording act in the same week that he's enjoying his first chart-topper as a songwriter. Making it somewhat more unusual, at least among multi-hyphenate types: he just turned 21 about a month ago.

We're talking about former boy bander, former small-screen star, and TRL mainstay Jesse McCartney. The song he co-wrote—Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love," penned with OneRepublic schlock-meister Ryan Tedder—is actually in its fourth nonconsecutive week at No. 1. The newer hit is his own: "Leavin'," which leaps four spots to No. 10 after a huge, iTunes-fueled debut last week.

Throw in the fact that he did a voice for the March blockbuster Horton Hears A Who! and this kid's having an awfully good spring.

Most weeks, a song rising four places into the Top 10 is nothing to blog about, but McCartney's little move defies recent trends in a big way. Just moving up the chart at all after such a big, sales-driven debut is unusual.

Look at what happened to last week's highest debut, Chris Brown's "Forever," which materialized at No. 9. As I expected, this so-called "special edition" bonus cut fell out of the Top 10 in week two. It follows the typical pattern of songs that debut big on sales alone but haven't gotten on the radio yet. Sure enough, "Forever"'s sales drop 21% and it continues to lack radio airplay.

I expected that, after popping onto the chart at No. 14 last week, McCartney would experience a similar second-week swoon. After all, "Leavin'" has been available to radio stations and MTV since early March, and until last week it looked like a flop. But the song's numbers actually improved in week two: digital sales now top 100,000, an 8% improvement, and it's finally made an appearance on Billboard's all-format radio list. Radio PDs are usually quite a bit slower to respond to sales smashes.

Nowadays it's not at all unusual in the world of hip-hop to see acts flipping between writing/producing and performing. When a Diddy or Fitty type is hot, you'll see them all over the charts with multiple above- and below-the-line credits. But in the pop world, at least recently, it's fairly unusual for someone so young to pull it off.

And the simultaneous coming-out as writer and performer is quite unusual, even in the not-so-recent past. Big hits co-written by that other McCartney, but performed by other acts, came after a slew of Beatles smashes. Other singer-songwriters flipped the order, first writing Top 10s and then recording their own: Dylan scored hits by the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary years before "Like a Rolling Stone"; for Bruce Springsteen, Top 10s penned for Manfred Mann and the Pointer Sisters came before his own "Hungry Heart."

Okay, I'm not going to remotely compare this TRL pipsqueak's talents to any of the above. "Leavin'" is charming and catchy and that's about it; and that Leona Lewis hit is rapidly turning into an earworm fungus. (Actually, the fact that I love the verse and build of "Bleeding Love" and hate the repetitive-ass chorus makes me want to credit McCartney with the former and blame Ryan "Apologize" Tedder for the latter.) Also, it's not as if McCartney just started recording—his slow-building, eventually inescapable hit "Beautiful Soul" reached the Top 20 way back in 2004.

Still, the fact that he now bookends the Top 10 after never appearing there at all before a few weeks ago is a worthy achievement. Nice going, Bradin.

Here's a rundown of the rest of this week's charts:

• I shouldn't neglect the other new Top 10 hit, which actually made a bigger move than McCartney, up 11 spaces to No. 8. But the reason Natasha Bedingfield's "Pocketful of Sunshine" don't impress me much is that it had an assist from American Idol—Bedingfield performed the song on last week's results show. "Sunshine" is the third-biggest digital seller this week, more than doubling to 135,000 downloads, but radio is still catching up; in its third week on the all-airplay list, it sits just outside the top 50.

This is Bedingfield's first Top 10 hit since her unkillable up-with-people anthem "Unwritten" reached No. 5 two years ago. Two years is not a bad span between Top 10 hits, but it's notable because there have been numerous failed attempts to get the British Bedingfield past the sophomore jinx in America over the past year: her British hit "I Wanna Have Your Babies" was nixed for American release last year, and her incongruous duet with Sean Kingston, "Love Like This," just missed the Top 10 in January and didn't do much for sales of her U.S. album. The "Sunshine" single finally appears to be doing the trick, as her album sales are up 200% this week.

• Weezer moves into the penthouse on the Modern Rock chart with "Pork and Beans," surprising no one after last week's explosion into the Top Three on that list. On the big chart, however, the single is looking like a dud, falling six spots to No. 90. Digital sales are down 11%, and non-rock radio stations aren't picking up on the laconic twanger at all—it's nowhere to be found on the Hot 100 Airplay list.

• Madonna's quest to take "4 Minutes" to No. 1 is clearly over. Even though Hard Candy debuted atop the album charts, the single doesn't get the typical corresponding release-week boost and slips two notches to No. 6 on the Hot 100. That may be because, like Mariah Carey, Madge is already moving on to single number two: the Pharrell Williams-backed "Give It 2 Me" is the Hot 100's top debut at No. 57, thanks to its nearly 30,000 digital downloads. It's kind of ironic, because slow-moving PDs were just catching on to "4 Minutes"—after weeks of slow-growing airplay, it's finally approaching the 10 most-played songs on the radio.

• We'll talk more about this next week, but for now, I'll give you a topic to discuss. Resolved: special-edition bonus tracks are a scam, but they work.

The reason we'll have more to talk about a week hence is that next week's chart-topper could be Rihanna's "Take a Bow," a song from the forthcoming "special edition" of Good Girl Gone Bad. "Bow" currently resides all the way down at No. 53 after four weeks on the chart, but thus far it's been charting based on airplay alone. That's about to change, big-time: "Bow" was released this past Tuesday on iTunes and already is No. 1 there. Like Chris Brown with his "special edition" track "Forever," sales alone for "Bow" will undoubtedly be enough to vault it into the Top 10. But unlike Brown, she's got solid and growing airplay for the snippy ballad, which suggests a leap all the way to the top is possible. Stay tuned.

Top 10s
Last week's position and total weeks charted in parentheses:

Hot 100
1. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 1, 12 weeks)
2. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 2, 8 weeks)
3. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 3, 18 weeks)
4. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 5, 12 weeks)
5. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 6, 14 weeks)
6. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 4, 7 weeks)
7. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 7, 12 weeks)
8. Natasha Bedingfield, "Pocketful of Sunshine" (LW No. 19, 12 weeks)
9. Sara Bareilles, "Love Song" (LW No. 8, 27 weeks)
10. Jesse McCartney, "Leavin'" (LW No. 14, 2 weeks)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 1, 8 weeks)
2. Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You" (LW No. 4, 12 weeks)
3. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 3, 13 weeks)
4. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 2, 13 weeks)
5. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 7, 9 weeks)
6. Rick Ross feat. T-Pain, "The Boss" (LW No. 5, 17 weeks)
7. Plies