The likes of Sparks, 30 Days, Timebomb, Let It Go, Live My Life, Ill Manors, Proud, Only The Horses, Rockstar, Love Me, Bright Lights, Seven Nation Army, Dance Again, Climax, Can't Say No, Last Time, Elephant and many others songs are all debuting pretty high yet plummeting out of the charts in a matter of weeks. Some of them are pretty good songs so what's the problem?

 

And yet some songs can spend months in the top 10 (Domino, Wild Ones, Good Feeling, Somebody That I Used To Know, Call Me Maybe, We Are Young, Starships, Mama Do The Hump)? Is that maybe the problem, that radio are only focusing on the same songs (the ones in the top 10) and not giving other songs a chance to shine? It's a bit boring seeing so many songs plummet down iTunes while the same ones are forever in the top 10.

I'd say that you answered your own question in your first paragraph. The majority of the songs you mentioned are just "pretty good songs". None of them are amazing though. In fact, some of them are dreadful, but I'm aware that comes down to personal opinion.

 

Some of the songs that have been huge recently have been fairly different to everything else that's around at the moment. That's certainly true with Gotye, and Carly's song is just a very catchy song that benefited from some good word of mouth.

 

I think the problem is that so many acts are just throwing out any old mediocre crap, and expecting it to sell based on their name. Very few artists appear to be putting in a lot of effort nowadays, it's all so bloody lazy. Underperforming singles are just what a lot of them deserve to be honest.

Edited June 3, 201213 yr by PaulM1983

Some of the songs you mentioned are very generic and indistinguishable from everything else (e.g. Dance Again, Live My Life, Let It Go, Only the Horses, Elephant, etc.)

 

Others got hardly any airplay on commercial radio stations (e.g. iLL Manors, Bright Lights, Proud (surprisingly).

 

Then there's ones like iLL Manors and Climax which are quite "niche" songs. Very good, but don't have broad appeal, so by definition they won't do that well in the charts. I think they did fantastically considering what they sound like.

 

Ones like Rockstar and Sparks got by far enough promotion (a similar amount to what massive #1s No Regrets and Twilight got), so clearly the public simply didn't like those songs.

 

And I'd say Can't Say No and Love Me did pretty well.

 

But I agree, the main "problem" is radio. There's definitely much less variety on radio stations as there was even just a couple of years ago. Capital FM has recently gone downhill, refusing to play some songs like Niggas in Paris, Mirror, Bright Lights, etc. which are literally PERFECT for that station. Yet I remember a few years ago they used to play pretty much every single song that went top 10 on iTunes, at least occasionally, and many that didn't. And Capital are also annoying, how Talk That Talk was out, but they kept playing We Found Love all the time instead for example...

Most of the songs listed IMO are just not good enough to be massive hits. They're pretty lazy attempts from artists who think people will buy anything they cough up.