Shakira rises to No. 1 on Hot 100 Airplay -- up from No. 2 last week.
However, "HDL" has pretty much been released to an iTunes store in EVERY country except the US. (Even Canada can download it but we can't... GRR). Shakira has been majorly robbed of her first US #1.
Its because of MONEY. Basically Shakira recorded an album that failed to produce any radio friendly or hit-potential songs that would make the album sell. So SONY has her record a song with Wyclef and re-released the album with a freakin huge sticker on it that says "INCLUDED HIPS DONT LIE!!!", in hope that the song would catch on. What is also weird is that they word "re-release" was never used for the promotion. They called it "Shakira's new album" - which completely diregards all of the previous copies that where shipped to stores months before! Another marketing ploy I guess. I will admit when I first heard the album, none of the tracks stood out at me. Shakira has this idea that she has to produce all of her music - yet it turns out Wycelf has to save her butt this time - otherwise this album would have tanked. And technically speaking - for the first 5 months of its release - it did!
^ exactly. It's kind of the same thing they did with Rihanna's "SOS." They didn't have it available for download until the album came out, and then when you COULD buy it as a single on iTunes, it shot 34 places to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. But since Shakira's already came out, "Hip's Don't Lie" won't make it big on the charts. Sucks.
Ya, the whole issue of holding off downloads is pretty annoying. I mean in the longrun it may just limit the amount of full downloads, people may get tired of it and decide not to download it where if it was released earlier they may have.
Most music execs are often dumb. They are after the almighty dollar but don't see the big picture really or anything in the long run.
