Member Since: 3/15/2013
Posts: 32,106
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Where Have All The Divas Gone? Their Album Sales Are Increasingly Troublesome
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In just a few short weeks, the rebuke "Don't be a diva!" has taken on new meaning (...)
That realization comes in the wake of recent releases from Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez, both of which have resulted in meager showings. Less than a month after sales of Carey's "Me. I Am Mariah... The Elusive Chanteuse" proved to be just as fickle as the album's title, selling a dismal 58,000 copies in its first week, industry forecasts expect Lopez's "A.K.A." won't sell even half of that.
The fact that Carey and Lopez -- who, in their mid-40s, are seeing a more than 50-percent decline from their previous albums -- can't hit the once-reliable 100,000 marker in first-week sales says something not only about the decaying interest in full-length records, but also about the dwindling stamina of established female singers. Now don't misunderstand: There are plenty of women making wonderful music and seizing the zeitgeist in big ways. In general, the conversation about the music industry's strain has little, if anything, to do with gender (...) for two of the biggest female singers to find career lows within the same few weeks at least calls into question the resilience of the so-called traditional diva, she of the grand, once-indomitable force in pop music.
Funeral dirges for album sales have been played ad nauseam for the better part of a decade, but if there's one group that seems to have endured the hardest hit it's the divas (...)
ther genres have at least surpassed expectations, no matter how mediocre those expectations were. Justin Timberlake, Eminem, Drake, Coldplay, Luke Bryan, Jay Z, Arcade Fire and John Mayer all outsold many of the (...) divas with their recent releases.
We're mourning the divas' decline. Thankfully no one outside of the industry is so fixated on Billboard results in 2014 that either of their overall careers will suffer in excess, but we'd hate to think that the day of the diva -- having been so dependable throughout the '90s and early 2000s -- may be inching toward death. If anything, we should at least bemoan the fact that the "Frozen" soundtrack was selling six-figure tallies months after it was released, yet fans who raced to buy Carey's and Lopez's albums 10 or 15 years ago are now thrusting a cold, hard "no, thanks" their way.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...&ir=Gay+Voices
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