It's been a tough chart week for Madonna. First, it looks like Neil Diamond's new full-length is going to knock Hard Candy out of the top spot on the U.S. album chart. Then Scooter shoots past her new album on the British charts. Scooter? The German techno band that seemed to be on every lousy compilation for awhile? Yep.
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The results of this week's round of album sales are trickling in, and it looks like Neil Diamond will take the top spot, selling in the neighborhood of 125,000 copies. Diamond's previous album, 12 Songs, debuted at No. 4, which may be a sign that Matt Sweeney's acclaimed guitar work on Home Before Dark is responsible for its success. Projections have all non-Neil Diamond albums selling below the six figure benchmark; Clay Aiken slides into second place with less than half of the first-week sales of 2006's A Thousand Different Ways. What happened, Claymates? You've let your red-haired angel down. Madonna and Mariah Carey hang on desperately to the three and four spots, while Gavin DeGraw, Toby Keith, Leona Lewis, Josh Groban, Dierks Bentley, and Michael Buble round out the most depressing top ten in recent memory. [HITS]
50 Cent thinks that the path Lil Wayne is currently traveling down—while it may have led him to his first career No. 1 single—is a dangerous one, because it's one that Curtis sees as similar to the path he traveled down in recent years. You may remember that era, when he released "Candy Shop" and "Amusement Park" back to back, only to see the latter greeted by yawns that were so loud, they pushed Curtis' release date back by months. So is 50 saying that "Lollipop" is a crummy song propped up by a persona that's as calculated as the supplement list in a bottle of Vitamin Water, and that No. 1 lightning doesn't strike twice on those sorts of combinations? As if! He's under the impression that the masses rejected "Amusement Park" because it just gave the audience too much sexy after the lick-heavy metaphors of "Candy Shop"... and that people will do the same to Weezy's next track from Tha Carter III if he isn't careful.
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As part of Idolator's continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics' Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. In this installment, he flips the dial to the nation's Adult Contemporary stations and finds a lot of familiar faces.
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Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" is your No. 1 single this week, and the first chart-topping single of his career. Hey, look, a sign that Tha Carter III might actually not get pushed back to October 2009! (Also, if anyone chalks this bit of success up to blogs, they're going to get a kick in the shins.) [Billboard]
After this weekend's hubbub over David Cook's Analog Heart topping Amazon's digital-download chart—then getting mysteriously pulled from the store—I was sure that the album would be somewhere in the lower reaches of SoundScan's Digital Albums Chart, a 50-album list that is rounded out this week by the 1,700-units-sold Bloodrunk by Children Of Bodom. Doesn't 1,700 downloads seem like a low-enough bar for an album that's No. 1 on a major download site's chart to leap over? Apparently not; Analog Heart isn't there. But why? I have two plausible reasons!
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Spanish mobile carrier Yoigo has posted a list of its most popular ringtone downloads in the Sala de Música section of its Web site, and not surprisingly, Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music" is No. 1. Rihanna must have a killer European publicity team, because she has an almost God-like omnipresence on this continent. But the rest of the list is highlighted by Spanish and Latin American pop, including a Sevillan boy band and Spain's particularly pathetic Eurovision entry.
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George Strait seems lined up for the top on next week's album sales chart, but it seems like depressing me with an appearance on Today earlier this week paid off for R.E.M.—Accelerate will likely grab the No. 2 spot, according to the occasionally reliable projections over at HITS. The Matt Lauer-introduced clip, as well as more chart wonkery, below the cut.
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chrism: She actually did it: No. 1: "Bleeding Love," Leona Lewis
mauraidolator: wow!
chrism: I can't believe Sony BMG pulled that shit off
mauraidolator: oprah man
chrism: I know right?!!
mauraidolator: haha
chrism: I mean, wow — what was I saying about "military efficiency"? Scary.
mauraidolator: :)
[Photo via leona-lewis.net]
The new music-recommendation service Songkick—which sends out e-mail alerts to users when their favorite artists come to town, and uses a last.fm-like recommendation engine to tell its users about "similar artists" being out on tour—has developed a Battle Of The Bands application, which is sort of like Googlefight with the added nebulousness of using data from MySpace (like number of friends and number of song streams added per week) and Amazon. We put it to the test with three artists who have recently made headlines by using the Internet as part of their distribution strategy, and the results may surprise you:
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Elvis fans, as you might have guessed, are a bit of a nutty breed. When I was the sort of person who collected and sold records, a woman begged me to sell her a copy of the soundtrack to Roustabout. (Actual begging, I assure you.) She needed it, apparently, to complete her collection of all the Elvis soundtracks. I ended up giving it to her, partially to get her to go away. But to actually consider that there are people out there collecting Elvis soundtracks, as if the movies themselves weren't bad enough, is somewhat staggering, which may be why it didn't surprise me to see the latest front of Elvis-related insanity.
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This year, the dawning of spring is a little bit brighter than it has been in years past: Not only is Daylight Savings Time kicking in early and the weather getting a little nicer (at least in NYC), but Flo Rida's "Low" has finally fallen from the top spot on the Billboard 100, thanks to the insane digital sales of Usher's "Love In This Club," which moved 198,000 downloads in its first week on download stores' virtual shelves and rocketed from No. 51 to No. 1 on the big chart. Sure, "Low" only slipped to No. 2, but every journey begins with one step, right? [Billboard]
Just A Reminder
Despite my best efforts to make 2008 200great, the truth can't be denied: We are living in a year that has not known a No. 1 song that isn't Flo Rida's "Low." When will the madness end? Please don't say "when his new single, 'Elevator,' swoops in to take the top spot," even if it did jump from No. 100 to No. 28 this week. My heart can't take it. [Billboard]
The album chart that came out yesterday was filled with Grammy-feted albums, but there was one notable omission from it: The new, Akon-studded version of Michael Jackson's Thriller, which sold 166,000 copies but was relegated to Billboard's catalog charts. According to the New York Daily News, execs at Sony are calling Billboard's decision "unfathomable... Michael expected it to be on the Top 200 chart." But the mag claims that other reissues with even more deluxe material than Thriller 25 have also been placed on the catalog chart, and that Wal-Mart and Best Buy concurred with its decision.
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From Hits: "[Next] week's chart will probably be topped by Rhino's soundtrack to the universally adored* Juno, with a projected 70-75k. It should be followed by a still-robust Alicia Keys (J/RMG), who's headed toward 60-65k, with Radiohead (TBD/ATO/RED) and Mary J. Blige (Geffen) both looking 55-60k-ish. After that comes a big drop, with nine—count 'em—nine releases all trending toward 25-30k; Yup, a piddly 25k will get you in the Top 10 next week. " And if you thought that was bad, wait, it looks even worse when you compare it to the numbers from this time last year!
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Mary J. Blige has ended Josh Groban's Christmas-fueled reign at Billboard's top spot by selling 204,000 copies of Growing Pains. But! The Oprah-beloved Noel did sell 178,000 copies last week, and I suspect that given the soft sales market all around the damn thing will probably hover around the top 40 or so until at least Valentine's Day. [Billboard.biz]
.jpg "This Year, \"American Idol\" Will Be Won By A Dude Named David (But You Knew That Already)")
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