Where are the fans ?

What do I mean?

Well it all started with Joe from last years X Factor !  

Why do you ask ?

Well Joe McElderry's single Ambitions,'only' reached No.6# in the UK Top 40 Singles Chart,which is surprising as he has the machine that is Sony BMG and SYCO (Simon Cowell's Label) behind him.I had a look on-line and noticed that the video had received over a 1/4 of a million views,whilst others had double to over 10 times the amount of  views.An example of this is Cee Lo Green's video for F*** You,which had an amazing 1 million videos on it's first week and now has over 11,500,000 million views.No surprise that he is No.1# for the second week running and he has faced tough competition ,too.

Even the song Diva Fever sang on Saturday entered the chart at No.3#.The song in question is entitled Barbara Streisand by Duck Sauce (aka Armand Van Helden and A-Trak),who like Joe was also a new entry on this week's chart.Duck Sauce are well connected in the music industry,their video is full of cameos which even include Kanye West (A-Trak was once his DJ).



Maybe SYCO didn't promote the single enough or maybe they thought the appearance on X Factor was enough.Sadly the music industry is much more competitive than previous years with more genres breaking into the mainstream.Especially with the success of Urban music (UK and American).Unfortunately for artists, it is getting HARDER and HARDER to break the market.You have to have an mass audience that will buy your singles etc.Popularity is not enough,high single/album/download sales = commercial success and fans = popularity.Popularity via fans ALONE just equals fans.

A good example of a commercially successful artist is Tinie Tempah,who has two singles (Written in the Stars and  Ibiza 2 Miami which features Tinie) released a week between each other.  

Yet they are both in the Top 5!!

Also during that same period of time,Tinie also entered the album charts straight at No.1#.The first artist who derived from the UK Grime scene to have had two No1#  and 2 Top 5 singles from his debut Album.

All in All,good luck to Joe with his future releases,he is very talented and hopefully his true fans will stay with him on his post-X Factor journey.