“Time” Tries To Rack Up The Pageviews With A List Of 10 Songs That A Writer Happened To Hear This Summer

noah | August 25, 2008 4:00 am
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Not that I expect the lumbering newsmagazine Time to be cutting-edge or anything, but its oddly timed package “The Songs Of Summer 2008” sure does provide an argument in favor of the microcriticism service Blippr. The list, which is presented in the time-honored “listicle spread out over ten separate Web pages so as to maximize clicking” form, basically collects 10 songs that have nothing in common except for their having been played on commercial radio sometime this year. (Maybe even as early as February!) You’d think that a publication that fancied itself to be Web-savvy would have been all over some of these songs by now, but apparently Time‘s overlords need a few more day-late, dollar-short, annoyingly designed packages before they rethink their online culture strategy for the 48,627th time in the magazine’s online existence. The mag’s list of top songs after the jump.

1. Kid Rock – “All Summer Long” 2. Rihanna – “Disturbia” 3. Usher – “Love in This Club” 4. Estelle – “American Boy” 5. T.I. – “No Matter What” 6. Leona Lewis – “Bleeding Love” 7. Lil Wayne – “A Milli” 8. Pussycat Dolls – “When I Grow Up” 9. Coldplay – “Viva La Vida” 10. Katy Perry – “I Kissed a Girl”

“A Milli” and “I Kissed A Girl,” sure. But “Love In This Club”–oh, you mean the song that hit No. 1 back in March? “Bleeding Love”–which also peaked in May? “When I Grow Up”–which sucks? I’m not even going to get into the part where the writer claims that “No Matter What” is underperforming because T.I. is still under house arrest and unable to do promo, since he might have been as confused by the midmorning scheduling of TRL–on which the MC appeared earlier this month–as I was at first. (And I don’t really expect a Time writer to have 106 & Park on their TiVo season-pass list.)

The Songs Of Summer 2008 [Time; HT Rap-Up]