flashlight 3-11: the music industry still sleeps

The Black Eyed Peas are spending a third week at the German top spot. That’s what chart compiling company media control announces on tuesday. The market was still calm in sales week 7th to 13th January. No big releases meaning no chart movement. Finally we witness the usual start of the year freezing. As I told several times music markets in a variety of countries are much faster. The United Kingdom got a sensational new no.1 this week … Well, Germans are kind of conservative and sedate. If we’d look at the first charts of every year we’d recognize a lot of long running no.1’s in this very first weeks. Except the change 2009/2010. A year ago we had three strong hits fascinating the crowd: Aura Dione with I Will Love You Monday (365), Keri Hilson with I Like and Lady Gaga’s latest no.1 Bad Romance. In 2011 everything is different. The Black Eyed Peas ruling the scene so far. Next week I bet the picture will completely change.

I did not say the whole truth. There were some new releases in the first full week of 2011. Ke$ha tried to continue her succesfull chart carreer with We R Who We R a release taken from her EP Cannibal which never entered the charts despite it is available since end of November. Originally the release date was set mid of December but for some unknown reasons the full release appeared only in 2011. German internet music site laut.de criticized Cannibal as it was planned for accompa nying the Animal-Deluxe-Release. Instead of being bonus material the music company made it a standalone release. In the US it worked somehow (no. 15 in the Billboard list). In Europe the big marketing plan failed. Indeed We R Who We R sounds like the 100th version of TiK ToK – cool party kids don’t need this. That’s why the „new“ single only enters the German list at no.23 – the lowest rank for a Ke$ha solo release. I don’t want to prophesy bad things but it seems Ke$ha is right now on a straight road to American outback clubs.


Links
- chart commentary on British charts by James Masterton

in German
- media control-Pressemitteilung
- Besprechung "Cannibal" auf laut.de