Who knew that the names of nearly obsolete… More »
With layoffs to the left of me and a recession to my right, it’s been a disconcerting week on the fringes of the music industry. While I have my spectacular dishwashing skills to fall back on, the industry as a whole has been teetering on the brink of collapse for some time. What better time than Halloween for someone to give those music biz-types another alert to some of the issues that should be keeping them up at night?
“I bet the same people complaining that a band… More »
“I have not been approached so far to fill in for… More »
It appears that Nokia’s grand Comes With Music plan is likely to be dead in the water before we know it, so another English download service has popped up in time for some holiday-season marketing. This one doesn’t require a specific cell phone, but it’s still far from the ideal the marketplace seems to be waiting for.
We knew last week that Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy” was poised to make a big leap on Billboard‘s Hot 100. The only question was, how big?
Just a year ago, a 65-space jump to No. 3 would have been enough to make our eyes pop. When Britney Spears did it in early October 2007 with “Gimme More,” it was considered something of a triumph—especially as she was at the height of her meltdown phase and coming off a tragic performance at the 2007 Video Music Awards.
Now, we’re a little harder to impress. In its third week on the charts, “Boy” makes the exact same move from No. 68 to No. 3–and chart geeks yawn. That’s because the last two months have brought three straight leaps all the way to No. 1 from below No. 70. (The most recent was by Spears herself, whose “Womanizer” bested “Gimme More” by shooting from No. 96 to the penthouse.)
Still, Beyoncé’s got nothing to be ashamed of: her gender-flip of Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend” (well, I like to think of it that way) is her ninth career Top 10 single and sold almost 190,000 digital downloads. And it brings her one hit away from matching the career chart record of the group she ditched four years ago.
