Will Kelly Clarkson’s New Single Hook Up With The Top Of The Charts?

noah | April 20, 2009 11:27 am

The ridiculously enjoyable “I Do Not Hook Up” has been teed up the second single from Kelly Clarkson’s All I Ever Wanted, and all systems so far seem to be go. The song is (deservedly) gaining steam on radio (it’s up to No. 28 on Mediabase’s Top 40 airplay chart), and a video for the track (after the jump) illicitly premiered this weekend; it’s also been added to MTV’s newly re-existent playlist. But will it top the Hot 100 like its pole-vaulting predecessor did?

Last week Mike wrote about the possible demise of the one-hit wonder in current pop, but if you talk strictly about chart performance, it would seem that even the most established pop stars can fill the role of the one-hit wonder for at least the course of an album’s promotional cycle. Madonna’s follow-up to the Hard Candy lead-in “4 Minutes” peaked at No. 57 on the Hot 100; Mariah Carey’s “Bye Bye,” which followed “Touch My Body” in the E=MC2 promotional parade, peaked at No. 19. And even successful follow-up singles like Beyonce’s “Halo” have had to reach the pop chart’s upper echelons at a slower pace than their predecessors.

What’s to blame more than anything? Digital-track sales, which seem to peak for established artists before their albums come out–when demand for new material for each artist is at its highest. “Hook Up” hasn’t hit the iTunes Top 100 yet, despite it being available a la carte as part of its parent album All I Ever Wanted; this may change soon (the very unscientific “popularity” metrix on iTunes has it outpolling the older “My Life Would Suck Without You”), but one wonders if sales (and illicit acquisitions) of the album won’t have the effect of cannibalizing peoples’ desire to cop the song for $1.29, thus torpedoing the song’s overall Hot 100 potential.

Katy Perry and Lady GaGa have bucked this trend with “Hot & Cold” and “Poker Face” respectively, but there’s an important distinction to be made between them and Clarkson; they’re both relatively new artists whose initial single-serving hit came after any pre-release hype for their albums. (Which have both sold well–Perry’s One Of The Boys is flirting with the million-sold mark after being available for 43 weeks, while GaGa’s The Fame has moved 659,000 copies after about half a year in stores. It’s probably worth noting that neither of those albums had a week of sales as big as Clarkson’s first-week mark of 255,000.) It seems like it’s harder for established artists to keep their pop careers, well, established in the singles-driven era for more than the life cycle of a single, which could be a testament to both the center falling away and peoples’ increasingly distracted attitude toward pop music.

Kelly Clarkson – I Do Not Hook Up (Video) [Blazing Swarm]

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