As we noted here already today, American Idol winner Phillip Phillips’ coronation single “Home” has leapt from number 84 to number 9 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 this week following multiple TV spots in women’s gymnastics segments in NBC’s Olympic coverage.
The track was downloaded 228,000 times last week (a whopping 472 percent increase), and even 11 days after its first Fab Five placement, it’s still no. 1 on the iTunes singles chart.
But how did “Home” end up getting involved with the Olympics in the first place? We called NBC Sports and talked to senior Olympics producer David Michaels to find out… READ FULL STORY »
‘ fourth season continues tonight with an episode directed by star Mark Feuerstein. But while wearing multiple hats can (and does!) make for some busy days, the actor, who also is a favorite recurring co-host on Live! with Kelly, took some time to peek into his iPod for MusicMix.
Read below for his top five picks — and some highly entertaining stories.
1. “Lady in Red,” Chris de Burgh. “In college we had a roommate from the Caribbean who cranked this song on full blast all day-everyday. Finally I knocked on his door and said ‘Lyndon, how can you listen to that song 24 hours a day/7 days a week?’ His response, ‘Mark, man, how can I not?’ READ FULL STORY »
It’s been a full eight months since Virgin Islands belter Melanie Amaro was crowned the inaugural winner of the U.S. version of The X-Factor.
Today, the singer, who earned a $5 million contract with Epic Records head L.A. Reid, has released her debut single online.
The track, titled “Don’t Fail Me Now,” is a bit of a mishmash, featuring a thumping club beat, soaring diva notes (some of which sound seemingly and unnecessarily Auto-Tuned), techno flourishes, and a bevvy of inspirational-slash-romantic lyrics.
All of it leaves me a little confused — is she singing about her man, or The Man Upstairs? On the bright side, I’m weirdly charmed hearing the word “feet” sung in bell-clear falsetto so many times.
The Anthony Mander-directed clip begins with some narrative dialogue between Bieber and what looks like a character from Grand Theft Auto: Vice Citybut is really Reservoir Dogs actor Michael Madsen. Madsen plays a protective father of Bieber’s love interest, played by 21 Jump Street actress Chanel Celaya. “She needs to be with a man, not a boy,” Madsen warns the singer, who in fact is a man. “I don’t want to know you. You need to get in your car and leave and don’t come back ’cause if you do, it’s not gonna be good for you.”
Yet Bieber’s heart tells him to stay the course, even if it means his body will suffer a bloody beating in a parking-garage scene that boldly calls to mind Michael Jackson’s “Bad” video, plus a splash of Drive.
Check out the “As Long As You Love Me” video below:
Richardson, who left the band in 2006, has been known to pop up at a Backstreet Boys show once or twice during his absence from the group, but this will mark his first time they’ve hit the stage together since reuniting.
The group, who is in the studio working on an album set for release in spring 2013, also announced via press release that they will soon be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles.
Information on how to attend the concert is available at gmaconcerts.com, where you will essentially be told to line up behind me.
How did you spend your Independence Day? Community star Donald Glover performed in London (TURNCOAT!) to celebrate the release of his brand new, absolutely free mixtape Royalty. Go ahead and download it here.
Royalty follows up Gambino’s 2011 label debut Camp, an incredibly accomplished compilation that ranked as one of the best releases of last year. Save for a few moments, the only voice heard on Camp was Gambino’s, but Royalty flips the script by inviting along seemingly everybody the rapper/comedian has ever met. The guest list includes Wu-Tang Clan icons RZA and Ghostface Killah (appropriate considering Gambino got his nom-de-hip-hop from the Wu-Tang Name Generator), a handful of fellow underground sensations (Danny Brown, Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul), and even Beck, who raps as though he never stopped.
The re-emergence of Beck on the mixtape (he also produces two tracks) would be a pretty big headline were it not for the debut of a woman new to the rap game: 30 Rock creator and former Glover employer Tina Fey, who drops in on the album-closing track “Real Estate” and is in fact the last voice heard on Royalty. Give it a spin below (and skip forward to the 4:50 mark if you want to get right to Fey’s contribution).
Pentatonix, the awesomely futuristic winning group from Season 3 of NBC’s now-canceled a cappella singing competition The Sing-Off, which averaged about 4.5 million viewers in its last season, sold a rather impressive 18,401 copies of their debut PTX, Vol. 1 in its first week, good for 11th place on the chart, according to Hits Daily Double.
That means that Pentatonix’s online-only EP, which is being distributed via iTunes by indie label Madison Gate Records, sold almost twice as many copies as The Voice winner Javier Colon’s Universal Republic-produced Come Through For You did in its first week. Colon’s disc peaked at number 134 with anemic first-week sales of just 9,974 copies in late 2011.
Mind you, Colon’s season of The Voice, which coach Adam Levine called “the platinum standard” earlier this year in response to American Idol‘s assertion that it was the “gold standard” in the singing-competition world, averaged 10.6 million viewers and boasted a much younger demographic than The Sing-Off. NBC is bringing back The Voice for both a fall and spring season this year.
Do you have Pentatnix’s new record? (I do, and it’s absolutely terrific — even the originals!) Will The Voice‘s latest winner, Jermaine Paul, fare better than Colon? And can we all agree that criticizing Idol‘s record sales seems pretty silly when other reality competitions yield numbers like these? (For comparison’s sake, Pentatonix also outsold Season 8 Idol winner Kris Allen’s sophomore disc Thank You Camellia, which started with over 16,000 copies earlier this year. Still they didn’t come close to matching the 198,000 debut of Scotty McCreery’s Clear As Day.)
Despite Chris Rock’s protestations (“It’s just people singing over rap beats!”), R&B had a fruitful and vibrant decade from 1990 to 2000: The rise of New Jack Swing, the innovation of hip-hop soul, a bevy of breakout stars, and the ever expanding and collapsing boundaries of the genre.
To celebrate the Age of Irony’s best booty shakers and slow jams, VH1 is airing “40 Greatest R&B Songs of the ’90s” on Thursday night at 9 p.m. With the assistance of stars like Usher and Keith Sweat, the countdown special tips its hat to smashes like Ginuwine’s “Pony,” Boyz II Men’s “Motownphilly,” and Bobby Brown’s immortal “Humpin’ Around.”
In fact, all three of those songs appear in the bottom 10 of the countdown. Check out entries 40 to 30 in an exclusive reveal below.
Aww, it’s always sweet to see two beautiful celebrities handling a stranger’s baby.
Maroon 5′s new album Overexposedhits streets today, and Adam Levine and co. have released a new video to celebrate. The clip is for the album’s lead-off track and second single “One More Night” and was helmed by Peter Berg, whose directing résumé includes Friday Night Lights (the movie and the show), Hancock, and Battleship.
You might expect an epic music video — the “Payphone” clip was a mini action film, after all — but the concept is on the subdued side. Levine plays a stressed-out boxer struggling to bring the bacon home to his wife, played by Minka Kelly, and their baby.
Things don’t end too well for our hero, whose wife ends up leaving him. But Levine’s still grateful Kelly showed up in the first place. As the giddy frontman said to MTV, ”Thank you, Minka Kelly, for doing our video!”
Find out what Levine’s all hopped up about by watching the “One More Night” video below:
The latest music-filled Disney Original Movie, Let It Shine — sort of a modern-day retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac with singing — premiered last Friday on the cable network to a very healthy 5.7 million viewers, and its soundtrack peaked at No. 1 on the iTunes soundtrack chart and No. 9 on the overall soundtrack chart. But a fact you may not realize about the movie is that its star, Coco Jones, was discovered via a talent competition — N.B.T. or Next Big Thing — that’s hosted by the cable channel’s sister music arm, Radio Disney, once each year. The fifth season of the competition is prepping to launch, and EW has an exclusive preview of the five acts that will be competing through this cycle.
Before we give you a little background on this season’s five competing musical acts — you can find a bit of info about them and a video performance from each below — let’s take a minute to learn a bit about the N.B.T. competition. Besides the aforementioned Jones, N.B.T. has launched the careers of recording artists Kicking Daisies, Shealeigh, and Allstar Weekend. It’s a multi-platform competition that puts the spotlight on aspiring young recording artists and showcases their music across national broadcast and online platforms. Over the course of 10 weeks, Radio Disney and Disney Channel audiences are invited to look, listen, and vote for their favorite artists.
