Britney Spears: do she even have a constituency? As the 31 year old former teen queen heads to Vegas, her recording career is on the wane. This week she sold around 108,000 copies of her “Britney Jean” album. That’s considerably less than her peers, such as Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Selena Gomez in their debut sales weeks.
Justin Bieber should watch the Britney saga closely. Spears’s stardom came in her late teens and early twenties. Her mental breakdowns and public spectacles didn’t help. But like most invented pop stars, Spears was not designed for a shelf life of more than five years. The fact that she sold even 100,000 copies this week is pretty good. But sales like that won’t sustain her over the next decade.
“Britney Jean” indeed sold fewer copies than the Duck Dynasty family The Robertsons, singing Christmas carols. (I cannot believe anyone in their right mind is buying or even listening to that.)
Britney will be alright. Even though “Britney Jean” is a non starter, the former pop tart will sell tickets in Vegas. And she’s got her Perfume. At least she made the effort. Way down the charts from number 4, around 20, is Lady Gaga’s scuffed and abandoned “ARTPOP.”
Jay Z leads the field with nine nominations, followed by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Pharrell Williams, Kendrick Lamar and Justin Timberlake with seven each. Drake nabbed five noms.
The Grammys will be handed out live from Staples Center in Los Angeles on Jan. 26 and broadcast on CBS at 8 p.m.
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He proclaims himself more influential than the President. .
But Kanye West’s Yeezus tour woes continued when less than 4,500 fans reportedly turned up to watch his show at a 19,000 seat arena in Kansas on Tuesday.
The Stronger star was surely far from impressed with the turnout at the Kansas City Sprint Center, but he tried to placate the audience during an eight minute rant. CONTINUE READING
From Showbiz 411:
Lady Gaga‘s ARTPOP dropped 81% in sales for its second week and fell to number 7 from first place. The album sold 50,154 copies, down from first week of almost 260K. ARTPOP will be written about one day as a huge marketing failure, unique in every way. After a long, much ballyhooed build up the finished product simply fizzled.
Lady Gaga– Stefani Germanotta– will learn a lesson about hubris from this experience. Maybe. She directed the entire campaign, went against the advice of others, and wound up losing a ton of money ($25 million seems severe, but lots) for herself and for Universal Music.
This means ARTPOP has sold just 300,000 copies in two weeks. Where are all her fans and ‘monsters’? They certainly didn’t like what they heard. But as I said before, ARTPOP was a gigantic misfire. Gaga tried to shove the art world down the throats of the fans. They didn’t want it, and they were confused by it. What had they related to was Gaga as champion of the underdog, the gay kid, the bullied kid, etc. Jeff Koons was not in their realm.
The flop album may yet affect more things, like a tour. It will be interesting to see if she can sell tickets to concerts with music no one bought. The best solution is get back with producer RedOne, add some songs to an ARTPOP 2.0, and try and revive the CD. It’s been done. But Gaga will have to listen to someone other than herself.
PS Eminem retook the number 1 spot with his Marshall Mathers LP 2. He sold 127.000 copies, about two and a half times as many as Gaga.
Her new album, ARTPOP, was conceived as an exploration of what happens when high-brow art meets low-brow pop and if there’s really any difference between the two. It’s a theme broached in her previous albums—and touched on by Kanye West in his oil-painting-turned-music-video for Power—but with ARTPOP, Gaga is trying to position herself as the second coming of Andy Warhol. Pop artist Jeff Koons designed the album’s cover, which features a naked sculpture of Gaga cupping her breasts while giving birth to a shiny blue ball. It’s art that could be easily mistaken for a slapdash Photoshop (ADBE) job.
Considering Gaga’s massive following of “Little Monsters,” as her fans call themselves, and the fact that her last album, 2011’s Born This Way, sold over 1.1 million copies during its first week (with a boost from a 99¢ promotion on Amazon (AMZN)), ARTPOP could’ve been the year’s biggest hit. Interscope Records (VIV:FP) spent about $25 million promoting the album, culminating in an over-the-top “artRave” event at Brooklyn’s Navy Yard on the night of ARTPOP‘s Nov. 11 release. CONTINUE READING
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