The Infinite Dial

I didn't chime in when Kelly Clarkson's "My December" was released this June, but I did listen to it right away and felt that it was much better than its advance publicity had made it out to be. For all of Clarkson's abortive attempts to become Linkin Park, there were still songs that had the tenor of CHR radio hits to them--particularly "One Minute" and "Can I Have A Kiss." Maybe they weren't "Since U Been Gone," but they were on the order of "Walk Away," good uptempo records that would allow Top 40 to play something by its No. 1 image artist, even if "Walk Away" and "Sober" didn't last.

Fast forward a few months and, with the exception of those stations still playing "Never Again," and a few scattered spins on "Sober," Clarkson's new album is almost entirely MIA at Top 40 and Hot AC. No further singles were serviced and no PD took it upon themselves to go find their own song to play.

To some extent, they didn't have to. There were records that filled the "Since U Been Gone" spot on Top 40 playlists this summer, particularly Pink's "U + Ur Hand" and "Who Knew" and Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend." But PDs who feel that life will go on perfectly well without Clarkson should consider the following:

During her summer horribilus, Clarkson has remained at No. 1 on the artist chart at HitPredictor.com, ahead of Christina Aguilera (2), Justin Timberlake (3), Pink (4), Daughtry (5), and Carrie Underwood (6). And whatever you think of HitPredictor which uses an on-line database to rate artists and new songs, the biases of on-line/database music research would tend to mediate against a mainstream pop artist with a conspicuous public failure.

All of which tends to reinforce my belief that the failure of the Clarkson project was as much about the negative buzz building on itself--many of them consumer press stories written before anybody had heard the album--as what was actually on the CD.

So now consider the calls I've gotten from reporters in the last few days asking what will happen to Britney Spears' "Gimme More" as a result of the bad publicity stemming from her MTV VMA performance. "Gimme More" was off to a great start at Top 40 radio and had, on its first listen, managed to elicit a "hey, that's alright" from even the most cynical of my co-workers who heard it. So did listeners wake up Monday morning and decide it was a bad record after all, just because it was performed badly on TV?

Normally, I would expect "Gimme More" to hang in for a few weeks, at least until the first callout came back, at which point Spears could have really used the help that a well-liked VMAs performance would have generated. If it does immediately lose steam, though, it will be one more example of the buzzkill taking on a life of its own. Which is too bad--radio could benefit from a real Britney hit right now and from a viable Kelly Clarkson single.