Idolator

Last Friday, one of the regular commenters on my "100 and Single" column poured cold water all over my prediction that Estelle's "American Boy" might finally creep into the U.S. Top 10. Noted regular reader ukidol, "Estelle's song has been removed from iTunes since the start of the week, so she'll drop sharply in the next chart. Think they're hoping for a Kid Rock-style album boost."

We won't find out how Estelle fared until the new Hot 100 appears later today, but yesterday's release of SoundScan figures bears out ukidol's prediction. "American Boy," which the prior week was the sixth-best selling digital song in the country, fell to 64th, as its sales took a 78% tumble from 86,700 copies to 19,100 copies. (Presumably, virtually all of those 19,100 copies sold in the first day or two of the tracking week before the song got pulled from iTunes.)

As of last week, "American Boy" was at No. 11 on the big chart. While the radio half of the Hot 100's sales-plus-airplay formulation might keep the song from falling out of the Top 40, no amount of radio growth will keep it from dropping at least a double-digit number of slots—if not this week, then the next.

Ed. note: Chris "dennisobell" Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on the Billboard Hot 100 in the latest installment of "100 And Single." This week, he takes a break from the regular charts, which are sleepy just before the holiday, to focus on the hits of the year:

A couple of weeks ago in this space, we tried to handicap the likely winners on Billboard's year-end charts. Well, we'd like to tell you there was a last-minute, super-exciting, left-field surprise, but things went pretty much as expected. Thanks to the strange December-to-November "chart year" Billboard uses to calculate its year-end tallies, two releases that got their start back when 2006's turkeys were in the oven are the big winners for 2007: Beyonce's "Irreplaceable," and Chris Daughtry's self-monikered debut album. Maura has already covered the latter, so let's focus on Billboard's No. 1 Hot 100 song of the year.