After scoring the biggest hit of her career in 2012 with "Give Your Heart a Break," Demi Lovato started the campaign for her next album with her best sales week ever for a song. "Heart Attack," the lead single from her forthcoming, as-yet-untitled fourth full-length, due out in late spring/early summer, rockets to a No. 12 debut on this week's Hot 100 chart with 215,000 downloads sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Heart Attack" was originally set for a March 4 premiere on Ryan Seacrest's syndicated radio show, but leaked online on Feb. 24, springing Hollywood Records' marketing department into early action. "I was having an Oscar party at my house when [the leak] went down, so I had to excuse myself and have a conference call," Hollywood Records' head of global marketing Robbie Snow recalls with a laugh.
Hollywood quickly made the song available on iTunes, Spotify and other streaming services on Feb. 25; pushed out an official Vevo clip of the song the same day (its garnered 4.5 million clicks since then); asked Seacrest to link his 9.1 million Twitter followers to the track; and debuted a lyric video on March 1. Lovato prompted fans to unlock the video by tweeting song lyrics and the hashtag #UnlockHeartAttack, which became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. (Click here for more on the "Heart Attack" lyric video.)
"Heart Attack" follows the same uptempo-yet-aching template as "Give Your Heart a Break," which spent 32 weeks on the Hot 100 in 2012. Sharon Dastur, program director of WHTZ New York (Z100), which played the song 16 times in seven days after its release, according to Nielsen BDS, notes that "Heart Attack" spent its first week in the station's "power new" rotation. "It's the hottest song over the last week that we've been playing, she says.
After performing "Heart Attack" for the first time at an Orlando concert on March 2, Lovato will tour Asia in the second half of the month. According to Snow, the "Heart Attack" music video will be out sometime in April. The label has yet to set a street date for the album, but he says it will expand Demis appeal beyond her core, primarily teenaged "Lovatics" fanbase. "It's going to be a very consistent record in terms of its feel," Snow says. "Even though she's only 20, there's certainly an effort to broaden her demographic."
http://m.billboard.com/articles/colu...big-debut-week
