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)

Some quick research on vocal cord hemorrhages shows that the affliction is usually caused by misuse of the voice. Here's what the American Academy of Otolaryngology has to say about them:

If you experience sudden loss of voice following yelling, shouting, or other strenuous vocal tasks, you may have developed a vocal cord hemorrhage. Vocal cord hemorrhage results when one of the blood vessels on the surface of the vocal cord ruptures and the soft tissues of the vocal cord fill with blood. It is considered a vocal emergency and is treated with absolute voice rest until the hemorrhage resolves. If you lose your voice after strenuous voice use, see your Otolaryngologist as soon as possible.

The use of "yelling" and "shouting" in that particular paragraph should give Simon Cowell some new ammunition for hopefuls who get "shrieky" during their time on the Idol stage. Vote For The Worst is claiming that the vocal-cord news "is just the tip of the iceberg" as far as developments in Sparks' career go, and since the news is making even those guys feel bad I'm sort of wondering what could possibly come next.

Will "Idol" Ever Sing Again? [NYP]
[Photo: AP]

Forget that sleepy winter we just endured. We've got a horse race.

The top slot on Billboard's Hot 100 has turned into a revolving door, as Mariah Carey succumbs to the gal she replaced just two weeks ago.

Boosted by the U.S. release of her debut album, Leona Lewis rides her biggest week of digital sales yet (223,000 downloads) to recapture the top slot on the chart with "Bleeding Love." Back in March, when the song first rose to No. 1, we snarked about the power of Oprah to make this British reality-show ingénue an American pop star. But at this point, it's only fair to say that Lewis' song is pretty much doing the heavy lifting on its own.

Lewis shouldn't get too comfortable, however: Almost every other song in the Top Five could plausibly replace her next week, including "Touch My Body," the Carey song she replaced.

That song makes an unusually large fall from the top slot, all the way down to No. 5—which says less about the weakness of Carey's hit than it does about the strength of the four songs above her. True, sales of "Touch" were down a wincing 28% last week (117,000 downloads), but her airplay continues to grow (up a little over 4%), which is remarkable since "Touch" is already the second-most-played song in the country. In a sleepier week, Mariah's middling performance would probably have kept her in the Top Three.

But she's fighting off not just Lewis, but two rising smashes and one former No. 1 that's still remarkably healthy. The rising hits are both duets, of a sort, and both are becoming ubiquitous on the radio: Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" featuring Static Major at No. 2, and Jordin Sparks' "No Air" featuring Chris Brown at No. 3.

Each of those songs has an explosive week of airplay growth. Sparks' ballad increases its radio audience by nearly 20% and is now the fourth-most-played hit. As for Weezy, airplay for "Lollipop" is smaller (seventh overall), but its more than 40% growth is eye-popping. Each tune is also helped by strong digital sales. "Lollipop" was already strong and ekes out a 4% rise to 178,000 downloads. "No Air" is boosted by Sparks and Brown appearing on last week's American Idol results show, propelling it by 34% to 154,000.

Usher's "Love in This Club" with Young Jeezy, the aforementioned former No. 1, is now at No. 4. Still radio's most-played song and still a relatively healthy seller, with 121,000 downloads, "Club" stands little chance of returning to No. 1. But the fact that Usher out-charts Mariah this week is fairly remarkable.

So what happens now? Who's No. 1 next week?

Lewis' digital sales will inevitably cool, along with her album in week two. So will Sparks' song, now that her triumphant return to Idol with a hit record (like a high-school reunion, innit?) is past. But each ingénue's airplay has lots of room to grow.

Speaking of Idol, the show dedicated a full week of shows to Mariah as part of Island Def Jam's you'd-have-to-live-under-a-rock-to-miss-this launch of E=MC2. It's expected to hit the album chart next week with the biggest debut sales of any 2008 album—around half a mil—and that's going to boost her iTunes sales all around. So: comeback for "Touch My Body," right? She does to Lewis what Lewis just did to her?

Not so fast: in her Idol performance, Carey showcased the album's next single, "Bye Bye" (which is probably another No. 1 hit; damn thing's catchy like a fungus). As of today, it's already selling nearly as many copies on iTunes as "Body." So basically, even while Carey moves truckloads of albums, she's splitting the vote, as it were, by promoting her old and new singles at the same time.

As tempting as it is to view next week's contest as a catfight (even Madonna is still a factor), all this up-and-down activity probably most benefits the one guy in the race: Lil Wayne. "Lollipop" has got the clearest momentum of any song on the chart right now, with sales solid as a rock and airplay on a tear—boosted by Top 40 as well as R&B/hip-hop radio, a combination only Carey has going for her.

In this year of smooth-talking guys outpolling hard-working women, don't be surprised if Weezy emerges with his first No. 1 hit sometime soon.

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

• This might just be me experiencing spring fever as New York City nears 80° today, but much as the "summer" movie season now begins closer to Mother's Day, this week feels like it might be the start of summer music season. That's got less to do with the qualities of the songs on the charts than with the revving up of the competition—signaling that radio's hot-and-heavy season, pitting lots of new songs against each other, has begun.

Basically, you've got to work harder to move up the chart this week. On the Hot 100, Madonna falls an outsize five places to No. 7 with the JT-assisted "4 Minutes," despite solid airplay growth and a modest decline in her blockbuster sales numbers (195,000 downloads, down 10%). On the R&B/Hip-Hop chart, the songs at Nos. 5 and 6, by Ray J and The-Dream, fall one notch each despite earning bullets from Billboard for growing airplay; both are likely pushed down by the rising Lil Wayne. A similar backward-bullet happens to Jason Aldean at No. 7 on the Country list; the culprit for his slippage is Phil Vassar. And on Modern Rock, a song that entered the Top 10 just last week, Ashes Divide's "The Stone," falls all the way back to No. 14 while maintaining its bullet, shoved back while the Raconteurs and Death Cab both reach the winners' circle.

• Sorry, I'm not trying to turn this into the American Idol column, but its annual "Idol Gives Back" show has songs pinging all over the charts.

Daughtry scores his... er, their biggest hit since last summer, as "What About Now" debuts all the way up at No. 18 after a live performance on the show.

Making a much, much bigger comeback is Annie Lennox, appearing on the Hot 100 for the first time since 1995—1995, people!—with her cover of Jimmy Cliff's "Many Rivers to Cross" at No. 80.

Also scoring with a cover is Carrie Underwood, debuting at No. 27 with George Michael's heaviest No. 1 hit, "Praying for Time." It's the second time that remaking a hit from the early '90s for "Idol Gives Back" has worked for Underwood, whose cover of the Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You" peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100 last year.

Finally, the entire Idol top eight, from Archuleta to White, just miss the Top 40 with the No. 43 debut of their Contemporary Christian singalong "Shout to the Lord."

The implied message of these chart appearances: Daughtry > Underwood > the Lord > Lennox. Does that seem backward to anyone else but me?

• It's too old a song to appear on the Hot 100, but perhaps the biggest Idol Gives Back beneficiary is the late Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, whose ukelele-infused cover of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" sells 59,000 downloads. Jason Castro strikes again!

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

Hot 100
1. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love" (LW No. 2, 9 weeks)
2. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 4, 5 weeks)
3. Jordin Sparks with Chris Brown, "No Air" (LW No. 7, 15 weeks)
4. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 5, 9 weeks)
5. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 1, 9 weeks)
6. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 6, 11 weeks)
7. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, "4 Minutes" (LW No. 3, 4 weeks)
8. Chris Brown, "With You" (LW No. 8, 20 weeks)
9. Sara Bareilles, "Love Song" (LW No. 9, 24 weeks)
10. Flo Rida feat. T-Pain, "Low" (LW No. 10, 25 weeks)

Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
1. Usher feat. Young Jeezy, "Love in This Club" (LW No. 1, 10 weeks)
2. Mariah Carey, "Touch My Body" (LW No. 2, 10 weeks)
3. Lil Wayne feat. Static Major, "Lollipop" (LW No. 7, 5 weeks)
4. Keyshia Cole, "I Remember" (LW No. 3, 24 weeks)
5. Ray J & Yung Berg, "Sexy Can I" (LW No. 4, 14 weeks)
6. The-Dream, "Falsetto" (LW No. 5, 19 weeks)
7. Rick Ross feat. T-Pain, "The Boss" (LW No. 10, 14 weeks)
8. Ashanti, "The Way That I Love You" (LW No. 12, 9 weeks)
9. Alicia Keys, "Like You'll Never See Me Again" (LW No. 8, 25 weeks)
10. J. Holiday, "Suffocate" (LW No. 6, 28 weeks)

Hot Country Songs
1. Trace Adkins, "You're Gonna Miss This" (LW No. 1, 19 weeks)
2. George Strait, "I Saw God Today" (LW No. 2, 10 weeks)
3. James Otto, "Just Got Started Lovin' You" (LW No. 4, 26 weeks)
4. Chris Cagle, "What Kinda Gone" (LW No. 3, 39 weeks)
5. Taylor Swift, "Picture to Burn" (LW No. 5, 14 weeks)
6. Phil Vassar, "Love Is A Beautiful Thing" (LW No. 8, 24 weeks)
7. Jason Aldean, "Laughed Until We Cried" (LW No. 6, 36 weeks)
8. Brad Paisley, "I'm Still a Guy" (LW No. 10, 8 weeks)
9. Rascal Flatts, "Every Day" (LW No. 9, 8 weeks)
10. Alan Jackson, "Small Town Southern Man" (LW No. 7, 23 weeks)

Hot Modern Rock Tracks
1. Puddle of Mudd, "Psycho" (LW No. 1, 24 weeks)
2. Seether, "Rise Above This" (LW No. 3, 8 weeks)
3. Atreyu, "Falling Down" (LW No. 4, 12 weeks)
4. Foo Fighters, "Long Road to Ruin" (LW No. 2, 25 weeks)
5. The Bravery, "Believe" (LW No. 5, 28 weeks)
6. 3 Doors Down, "It's Not My Time" (LW No. 6, 8 weeks)
7. The Raconteurs, "Salute Your Solution" (LW No. 11, 3 weeks)
8. Panic at the Disco, "Nine in the Afternoon" (LW No. 8, 11 weeks)
9. Foo Fighters, "The Pretender" (LW No. 7, 37 weeks)
10. Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart" (LW No. 12, 4 weeks)

Said performances ranged from stadium-pro competent (Fall Out Boy) to so forgettable that even detailed notes wouldn't have helped (Boys Like Girls), but the show was invariably at its weakest when the girls in the stands exuded more pep than whoever happened to be on stage at the time (Avril Lavigne, we're looking at you), with Jordin Sparks resorting to a Christmas song (because even a spunky American Idol winner knows better than to bait a packed MSG with an album cut) and soft-rocking harridan Colbie Caillat mercifully only allotted the time to nervously strum through the excreable "Bubbly." (Her "backing band," especially the guy keeping time with the egg shaker, have the sweetest gigs that a lazy session guy could ask for at the moment.)

The grownups and the survivors, Alicia Keys and the warmly recieved Backstreet Boys (side note: when did AJ start looking like the emo Dave Attell?), unsurprisingly proved to be the only performers who had the biz-honed ability to command a crowd that size, but even with Timbaland interminably padding out three songs with the kind of between-song rambling that you'd expect from a pop genius with an entitlement complex bigger than his neck rolls, Jingle Ball still intermittently offered the rally-esque rush you get from the arena-sized pop show. During the hits, everyone sang. During the songs yet (or never) to be hits, everyone tapped out mash notes to the Jonas Brothers on their phones.

And at the end of the day, we were watching a Jonas Brothers show that just happened to feature some former (and current) Billboard chart-toppers as openers. There are all sorts of marketing and promotional reasons to help explain Disney's current chokehold on pop, and no svengalis will ever go broke banking on three nonthreatening, babyfaced cuties playing uptempo bubblegum. But the Jonas Brothers could have spent their set armpit-farting into their mics and the little girls still would have collapsed lungs and shredded vocal chords to show their approval. You could almost see the industry on its knees, thankful for another tweener bandage on hemorrhaging sales. There will come a point when even the well-scrubbed middle school idols can't control the bleeding, but based on Friday night's reception, the Jonas Brothers should keep the body from flatlining at least through 2008. So, um, hooray?

Jingle Ball 2007 [Z100]
[Photo: Getty]

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2007 Jingle Ball [Z100]

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This has to be a mistake, right—why would any executive out there want to try and sell a record to people by using a photo that looks as if it was swiped from a paparazzo who lucked out and caught an Idol winner sneezing while standing in front of a scrachiti'd-up window on the 6 train? Of course, given its abject crappiness, watch it come out that this cover set Sparks' label back $60,000, too.

Jordin Sparks [album cover] [whatz-new]

ONE-LISTEN VERDICT: The new single by the most recent American Idol winner opens with some "Umbrella"-like dirty keyboards, but those are quickly pushed to the background in favor of a midtempo ballad that has its percussion dotted with a sampled "hey!"—for edge, maybe? "Tattoo" tries really hard to synthesize a lot of the big pop trends of the last month—the aforementioned synths, the easy strum of "Irreplaceable" (who "Tattoo" shares a producer with), that almost-distracting "hey!" that made me wonder for a second if she was going to break into "It Takes Two"—and it would be almost successful if not for the vocals: They are mixed way high, giving the whole thing an adult-contemporary gloss. I know, I know, Idol is a singing competition so of course you'd want to put the vocals front and center, but wasn't Jordin's selling point the fact that she was "only 17"? This track makes her sound like she's older than me—and that's not even taking into account the fact that the age of consent for getting tattooed in her home state of Arizona is, in fact, 18.
WHERE TO FIND IT: PopEater has the officially sanctioned stream, but there are Webrips of the track floating around out there, if you really need to hear it again.

[Photo: AP]

Jordin Sparks - This Is My Now (VNO Club Mix Edit) [MP3, link expired]
[Photo: AP]

After Jordin Sparks was crowned this year's American Idol last night, iTunes rushed into action, putting out five-song EPs that collect studio versions of songs from the finalists' repertoires this season. After the jump, we review the collections, and even imagine what Simon would say when each record was through.

Jordin Sparks
Cover: Did you know Jordin was only 17? You wouldn't by looking at this cover, which was apparently made with heavy use of the "Age Subject" filter in Photoshop.
Tracklist: "This Is My Now," "I Who Have Nothing," "Broken Wing," "To Love Somebody," "Wishing On A Star"
Best Moment: "Broken Wing," thanks to the plainspoken lyrics being believable for a teenager.
Worst Moment: "This Is My Now," which somehow is arranged to sound even more heartstring-tuggingly sappy. Oh, that tinkly piano!
It's All About Song Choice: The smooth-jazz cover of "Wishing On A Star" that Jordin sang in the top-three episode is there, in all of its backseat-of-the-car-service-at-3-am glory. Where was "You'll Never Walk Alone"?
What Simon Would Say: "A bit pageanty."

Blake Lewis
Cover: Blake: Just a bro who likes to relax in a really awkward position during his downtime.
Tracklist: "You Give Love A Bad Name," "Time Of The Season," "I Need To Know," "Love Song," "When The Stars Go Blue"
Best Moment: A completely credible cover of Marc Anthony's "I Need To Know."
Worst Moment: Trust us: You don't want to hear the Idol orchestra try to tackle the Zombies.
It's All About Song Choice: Apparently, Maroon 5 and Robin Thicke weren't interested in clearing its songs for this enterprise—that's the only explanation we could figure out for Blake's songs from last week, both of which were much better than most of this EP, going missing.
What Simon Would Say: "You don't have to beatbox on every song."

The winner: In head-to-head competition, Jordin; but we're wondering if Blake won overall, because the Idol arrangements of his songs drove the whole enterprise straight into the cheese palace. ("You Give Love A Bad Name" actually sounded better on TV, which we were not expecting at all.) He won't have to work with them now, right?