Our look at the closing lines of the biggest new-music reviews continues with a roundup of reactions to Disney’s soundtrack for the heartthrob-studded High School Musical 3, which lands in stores today:
In the doldrums of January 2006, several weeks after the annual flurry of post-Christmas music-buying, the iTunes Store was livened up by the sudden appearance on its best-sellers list of a bunch of new hit songs.
It’s not unheard of for the industry to drop new songs in the dead of winter by non-blockbuster, developing acts—but these songs were credited to a bunch of kids who’d never had a hit, or even a shred of major-label promotion.
Within a month, eight songs by this gang of toothsome newcomers with names like “Ashley Tisdale” and “Zac Efron” were on the Hot 100, the largest number of simultaneous charting songs from a single album ever. And that album, the soundtrack to the Disney Channel made-for-TV flick High School Musical, went on to become 2006’s top-selling disc.
The feat was almost precisely duplicated 18 months later, when the flick’s much-hyped sequel premiered. The High School Musical 2 soundtrack spawned seven simultaneous Hot 100 hits and was 2007’s best-selling album until a Josh Groban Christmas CD topped it in the last weeks of December.
In both cases, iTunes sales of single tracks served as early indicators: of the soundtrack albums’ blockbuster futures, and the movies’ repeatability and Zeitgeist-defining success. With High School Musical 3 nine days away from its premiere—in movie theaters this time—and the soundtrack album less than a week out, what are the early iTunes indicators telling us?
Call me an old sourpuss, but they’re telling me that, as a musical force at least, this franchise might be spent.
In two weeks, the soundtrack to Disney’s High School Musical 3 will land in stores, the final album in the trilogy of records that helped make adults who didn’t have children realize that the Mouse was still a force to be reckoned with in terms of delivering squeaky-clean pop music to the next generation. But will 3 give a boost to the album chart similar to those bestowed upon it by its two predecessors, which sold four million and 3.3 million copies, respectively?
When I heard that one of the songs on the soundtrack for High School Musical 3, which is bypassing the Disney Channel for a theatrical release this fall, was going to be called “I Want It All,” I was hoping it would be an updated version of the song by the electro-twee act Bis, with maybe a… More »
High School Musical 3 is bypassing the Disney Channel and going to theaters this October. The film’s plot is centered around “Troy (Zac Efron) and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) facing the prospect of being separated from one another as they head off in different directions to college,” and… More »
High School Musical 3 is bypassing the Disney Channel and going to theaters this October. The film’s plot is centered around “Troy (Zac Efron) and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) facing the prospect of being separated from one another as they head off in different directions to college,” and… More »
Occasionally* Gelfling-esque High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens has mostly suppressed the shame of having naked pictures she snapped for an ex hit the blogs back in September, but the incident has left her with a “valuable lesson,” one that she “tries to impart on other young women.”
If you were a parent, a preteen, or a weirdo hangin’ by the movie fone for the big screen versions of High School Musical and Hannah Montana (and their attendant soundtracks) in 2008, keep waiting, because shoddy shooting scripts coupled with the WGA strike bleeding dry the pool of people who can punch those scripts up have left Disney in the franchise-fracturing position of possibly having to mothball both for the time being, thereby alienating “fickle” grade school fans and/or destroying what’s left of the music (and ice tour!) industry as we know it! Maybe?
Now that purchasing music directly is out of style, how will the next generation consume their favorite Top 40 hits? And will they be able to do so while maintaining their daily personal hygiene routine? Hasbro’s Tooth Tunes Musical Toothbrush is the only brush that sends music through your teeth…and into your head! Which two-minute song clip would you choose to be sent “through your jawbone to your inner ear?
