Shortly after being honored at the 2011 MTV VMA, Britney Spears thrilled her fans by announcing that ‘Criminal’ will be the fourth official single from her ‘Femme Fatale’ album. The track follows ‘Hold It Against Me’, ‘Till The World Ends’ and ‘I Wanna Go’, which all peaked in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100.
Regardless of what song Spears chooses at this stage, the slow sales of ‘Femme Fatale’ remains a glaring point of concern. She has scored 3 top 10 singles, embarked on a heavily promoted US tour alongside Nicki Minaj and still benefits from strong support from Sony Music yet the album has sold less that 700K copies in the US since being released in March.
Furthermore, without being bolstered by timely remixes, Spears’ singles only enjoy momentary success on the charts and quickly fizzle shortly after being released. The simple explanation for this could be that the general public is losing interest in her as an artist.
In fact, it seems that Spears is becoming a singles act as her career progresses because of her attempts to please the club market as opposed to expanding her artistic depth. Interestingly, her Sony counterpart Beyonce has experienced a reverse phenomenon as she has generally distanced herself from the radio rat race and focused on musical growth, which caused her to become lose strength on the singles charts while still managing to sell albums albeit at a slower pace.
The next few years of both Spears and Beyonce’s careers will be rather interesting to observe. Each act has what the other lacks and can’t seem to find balance.
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