So far in our year-end series, Far East Movement gave props to Eminem’s Recovery while Adam Lambert waxed poetic about Sia. Thanks to his hit track, “I Like It”, we already know what Enrique Iglesias likes — the way you move on the floor, screaming like never before — but when it came to picking his favorite song of the year, we didn’t know what to expect. Jump below to find out what tune had Enrique’s fists pumping in 2010!

Enrique has had quite a year. He dropped his ninth (ninth!) album, Euphoria, and the only thing steamier than his sultry duet with Nicole Scherzinger on “Heartbeat” was him water-skiing naked in celebration of Spain winning the World Cup. (Baby, we like that.)

Of course, the singer and scored a major hit this year with the Pitbull-assisted, Jersey Shore-approved club jam “I Like It”, which was voted the Song Of The Summer by our readers. But as far as what Enrique’s listening to, he chose Linkin Park’s “Waiting For The End” from their new album A Thousand Suns as his favorite song of the year. (Watch the single’s music video here.)

The Spanish singer isn’t the only one praising the rock band. MTV compared Linkin Park’s latest to Radiohead’s Kid A, describing it as “dark, sprawling, discordant, [and] ambitious”, and calling it “so completely different from the band’s previous efforts that it will almost certainly stand as the line of demarcation between everything that came before and everything that will come after.”

Clearly, many people were fond of this new direction — the band’s fourth studio album topped the Billboard 200, and “Waiting For The End” peaked at #2 on both the Rock and Alternative charts.

Enrique tells us why he picked the rockers’ single as his fave of 2010:

Enrique Iglesias: It’s so hard for me to select just one song or album that is my absolute favorite of the year.  I listen to so many different types of music that it’s difficult to compare and pick one above the rest.  Whether it’s Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Cee Lo Green, Jason Mraz, Juan Luis Guerra, Marco Antonio Solis, Lionel Richie, Wisin & Yandel or Pitbull, it is difficult for me to select JUST ONE artist, let alone one song or one album.

I usually listen to new music through the radio, finding songs on YouTube and from recommendations through friends.  One song in particular that keeps standing out is Linkin Park’s new single, “Waiting For The End”. I know that the most recent album from the band has been a bit of departure from their usual style, and I always admire musicians who grow and take risks musically.

“Waiting For The End” has been in my heavy rotation recently because it has an amazingly melodic quality that builds into an upbeat rock anthem.  The song has a hook that gets stuck in your head, but I’m not mad at that.  It’s super catchy and has elements of pop, but holds true to the band’s rock roots. I like that the somber lyrics of the song contrast with the catchy begging and upbeat ending.  The more I listen to it the more I truly appreciate what the band has done with this song and their new album.

Still, Billboard’s Keith Caulfield points out that sales for Linkin Park’s latest (241,000) were far lower than thoses of the California band’s 2007 LP, Minutes To Midnight (623,000). Trey Songz was about 1,000 copies shy of matching Linkin Park’s tally this week.

Four other albums enter the Top 10—Jamey Johnson’s The Guitar Song (#4), Robert Plant’s Band Of Joy (#5), Weezer’s Hurley (#6) and Brandon Flowers’ Flamingo (#8). Elsewhere,  Florence + The Machine’s Lungs jumps from #44 to #14 in the wake of the MTV VMAs. Over on the Hot 100 singles chart, Florence’s “Dog Days Are Over” flies up 72 positions to #21.

Bruno Mars, who ran into a scrape with the law last weekend after being busted while allegedly in possession of cocaine, captures the top spot on the Hot 100 this week with “Just The Way You Are.”

Just watch how you celebrate, Bruno.

The Top 10 of Billboard’s Top 200 Albums:

1. Linkin Park, A Thousand Suns *new*
2. Trey Songz, Passion, Pain & Pleasure *new*
3. Eminem, Recovery
4. Jamey Johnson, The Guitar Song *new*
5. Robert Plant, Band Of Joy *new*
6. Weezer, Hurley *new*
7. Various, Now That’s What I Call Music! Vol. 35
8. Brandon Flowers, Flamingo *new*
9. Katy Perry, Teenage Dream
10. Justin Bieber, My World 2.0

“Just last Monday, I was saying how I would like to start directing more of Music For Relief’s attention to Haiti and developing some sustainable housing,” said Linkin Park bassist David “Phoenix” Farrell in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Then the earthquake happened Tuesday, and we really started scrambling to figure out a way that we could garner as much support from the music community as we could to hopefully raise a ton of money for the cause.”

Additionally, Rihanna will sing a cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” and Maxwell will perform “Fistful Of Tears” on The Oprah Winfrey Show today in an episode covering the Haiti tragedy. Wyclef Jean will show Winfrey’s audience footage he shot in the devastated country last week.

Rolling Stone also reports that on Friday, January 22, MTV’s Hope For Haiti television special will air commercial-free on all major networks. Artists performing include U2, Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay, Taylor Swift, Shakira, John Legend, Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys, Sting and Christina Aguilera.

Here’s the tracklist for Music For Relief’s Download To Donate (music clips below):

1. “Not Alone” – Linkin Park
2. “Mother Maria” – Slash featuring Beth Hart
3. “Never Let Me Down” – Kenna
4. “Heroes” – Peter Gabriel
5. “Still” – Alanis Morissette
6. “Resurrection” – Lupe Fiasco feat. Kenna
7. “We Are One” – Hoobastank
8. “The Wind Blows (Skrillex Remix)” – All-American Rejects
9. “It Must Be Love” – Enrique Iglesias
10. “Typical Situation (live)” – Dave Matthews Band

Seems odd that none of the Disney soundtracks (Hannah Montana, Camp Rock, etc.) were mostly glossed over in this roundup. And there have always been sorta-crappy tie-in soundtracks that haven’t sold very well—the cutout bins at the Princeton Record Exchange would seem to bear that out!


More specifically… the Linkin Park song from Transformers 2 wasn’t as big of an event this time as it was last year, because a) that was their first song in a while and b) the new song sounded a lot like it was conceived as a single to the first one. And isn’t making the Twilight soundtrack album-only, which one of the sources said was not a great idea, a savvy way of capitalizing on a rabid fanbase? There’s a reason Paramore’s “Decode” keeps winning every voted-by-fans award, and it certainly isn’t the quality of the music relative to other pieces of Paramore’s catalog. I suspect the Diablo Cody movie’s soundtrack will do well, too, because it’s pretty focused to people who are into the whole Fueled by Ramen thing.


Anyway, any thoughts you might have would be great! This article just smelled like a heap of “reported” bullshit to me, especially since last year we had the Mamma Mia! soundtrack, High School Musical, and Camp Rock all finishing the year relatively strong.

Courtney replied:

This article is incorrect—the main reason soundtracks are not sold as a la carte downloads on download services is because publishers and the labels who own the master rights don’t want them sold that way or demand a high premium for that licensing usage. They’d rather the movie drive to album sales for the artist than the soundtrack, especially if they aren’t the label releasing the soundtrack. It’s very typical.


A lot of this article strikes me as looking at it the wrong way. A lot of the movies they’re talking about are not music-driven films. In fact, most of the past examples they site as releasing seminal, best-selling soundtracks—Titanic, The Bodyguard, Hannah Montana movie, Twilight—these are chick flicks, and the latter two are heavily invested with a music element. The proper comparison is Mamma Mia!, whose soundtrack did gangbusters. To compare them to Watchmen or Bruno is silly.


Also why would I or anyone buy a Bruno soundtrack? That movie failed to meet monetary expectations at the box office to start with and it has a soundtrack full of things everyone owns already. It would have been flatly dumb for a studio to bother releasing a soundtrack to that film. I’d ask the same thing about a Transformers 2 soundtrack—why would anyone buy that? The target market, young men, are less inclined than any other audience to rebuy (or buy in the first place) stuff they already own (or can get for free). Also, that Linkin Park are leading the soundtrack is folly—it’s playing it safe. The Pew Internet Study of 2008 said people’s No. 1 place to discover new music was in movie and TV soundtracks. That is, not to discover artists they’ve known about for 10 years. New music. Honestly, how can your soundtrack not fail if your lead marketing tool is a band who have been fizzling for the last five years.


The 500 Days of Summer vs. Garden State argument is more interesting, although the piece could have swapped in Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Juno—why does one do better and the other flop when they should essentially be the same thing in terms of how and to whom they were marketed? Because the first one to the market wins. An idea is only original once, so to remarket basically the same concept and expect it to have the same social impact the second time is a faulty plan. Plus, maybe in both those cases the originals were just better and had a more lasting impact.

Indeed, comparing Transformers 2 to something like Titanic seems like something of a stretch, and if anything the Linkin Park song is not doing that badly on the Hot 100 (it’s currently No. 19) for being a fairly lackluster song by an older-than-most band that doesn’t really slot in well to the increasingly rhythmic direction of current chart-pop. And the success of Garden State and its attendant album, if I remember correctly, was a much slower burn than that afforded to 500 Days at this point—the Zooey Deschanel vehicle may seem like it’s been out for months because it’s been marketed from here to next week, but it only went into limited release in mid-July, as did its very oldies-heavy soundtrack, which has scanned 12,000 copies through last week’s charts. It kind of makes sense—after all, who wants to buy another copy of Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams (Come True)” when there are Michael Jackson retrospectives to get, am I right?


Slumping CD Sales, iTunes Policies Take Their Toll [The Wrap]

It’s time to see what the most-played songs and artists on rock radio have been from January to June. And surprise, surprise, the drummer/singer/guitarist you can’t get away from is in the top 5 of each list–twice. First, the top songs:

1. Seether, “Fake It”
2. Foo Fighters, “The Pretender”
3. Foo Fighters, “Long Road To Ruin”
4. Linkin Park, “Shadow Of The Day”
5. Puddle Of Mudd, “Psycho”
6. Bravery, “Believe”
7. Seether, “Rise Above This”
8. Finger Eleven, “Paralyzer”
9. Paramore, “CrushCrushCrush”
10. Rise Against, “The Good Left Undone”
11. Atreyu, “Falling Down”
12. Weezer, “Pork & Beans”
13. Three Days Grace, “Never Too Late”
14. Linkin Park, “Given Up”
15. Flobots, “Handlebars”
16. 3 Doors Down, “It’s Not My Time”
17. Death Cab For Cutie, “I Will Possess Your Heart”
18. Jack Johnson, “If I Had Eyes”
19. Panic At The Disco, “Nine In The Afternoon”
20. Chevelle, “I Get It”

Almost every song here cracked the top 5 of Billboard’s Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart, and the four that didn’t–Rise Against, Jack Johnson, Death Cab and Panic–peaked elsewhere in the top 10. But these figures are all about longevity, songs that stay on playlists for months and months, not the ones that make a big splash and then quickly disappear. Therefore, we get plenty of the 2007 hits that refuse to die like “The Pretender,” “Paralyzer,” and “Never Too Late.” And songs that broke in the spring and have been unavoidable ever since, like “Pork & Beans” and “Handlebars,” will almost surely rate higher on the year-end list.

“Nine In The Afternoon,” which I predicted would be a flash in the pan airplay-wise, has turned out to have substantial legs based on its placement here. That’s not to say I’m ready to halt my sophomore-slump schadenfreude for Panic At The Disco–their album Pretty. Odd. has still sold below expectations, and the slightly more tolerable follow-up single “That Green Gentleman” failed to chart at all, which may have helped clear the way for the long radio shelf life “Nine” has had.

Now, let’s look at the 20 most-played artists on alternative radio so far in 2008:

1. Foo Fighters
2. Linkin Park
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers
4. Green Day
5. Nirvana
6. Seether
7. Weezer
8. Pearl Jam
9. Stone Temple Pilots
10. Smashing Pumpkins
11. Three Days Grace
12. Offspring
13. Sublime
14. Incubus
15. Nine Inch Nails
16. Puddle Of Mudd
17. Paramore
18. Beastie Boys
19. Alice In Chains
20. Killers

Again, no surprises at the top, where the Foos and Linkin Park take their predictable spots, dominating with multiple singles from their 2007 albums and a comfortable bedrock of earlier hits. And Seether’s two big recent hits get them plenty far up, despite a relative lack of airplay for previous singles. But overall you’ve got an interesting cross-section here, one that demonstrates just how much older recurrents dominate alt-rock radio these days. Less than half of the artists–nine total, four in the top 10–have had new singles out in the last few months. Three of the bands haven’t been together for more than a decade, and the fact that those bands are Nirvana, Sublime, and Alice In Chains, all of whom have deceased frontmen, is a little creepy.

Even some of the still-active older bands get a negligible amount of their chart placement from recent material: Smashing Pumpkins have eight songs in the top 500 most played songs of the year, but last year’s underwhelming comeback single “Tarantula” is the least popular of those; all 10 of Pearl Jam’s entries are from no later than 1994; and even if Stone Temple Pilots came home from their reunion tour
tomorrow and recorded a smash hit, it’d struggle to get as many spins as “Interstate Love Song.” Meanwhile, Green Day, RHCP, Weezer and Nine Inch Nails get healthy spins for songs from the ’90s as well as those from this decade.

The enduring popularity of first-wave grunge bands makes the presence of umpteenth-wavers like Three Days Grace and Puddle of Mudd unsurprising. But it’s impressive that a relatively new band like Paramore has inched up so high on the list–especially since its two big hits were released in ‘07, and the one single the band released this year, the Idolator fave “That’s What You Get,” pretty much tanked, barely cracking the Modern Rock chart. And though The Killers’ Sam’s Town, released way back in 2006, was widely deemed a disappointment, enough of the band’s singles, including that album’s “When You Were Young,” have remained in recurrent play enough to keep them high up on the list. In fact, they’re up much higher than bands who achieved comparable success around the same time and haven’t had alt-rock hits lately, like My Chemical Romance (59) and Fall Out Boy (74). FOB might wanna keep that “Mr. Brightside” cover in their set for a while, because it might eventually be more familiar to the casual fans in the crowd than any of their originals.

Slash and Chester knocked out “Sweet Child O’ Mine” at a Camp Freddy all-star gig in Vegas, at the very least confirming that he would be a better fit for Velvet Revolver than a difficult junkie who can only pull off “It’s So Easy.”

The band also did “Highway To Hell” and “Whole Lotta Love,” songs considerably happier and hornier than anything Linkin Park has come up with. If he’s not leaving his compatriots in sensitive rap-rock, is he at least going to do more songs that match his increasingly metal look and lifestyle. After all, the guy who sang “Somewhere I Belong” is married to a Playboy Bunny.

Chester: “I am not Velvet Revolver’s new singer” [Kerrang! via Blabbermouth]
Chester Bennington, Slash… Playing Paradise City [YouTube]