Bror

Yes, 25 years ago, I mean do people still know it now xx

That is Eden's Crush's streams!

In all of her 234,000 streams on Spotify glory (curious as to whether the song has actually survived at all in the cultural canon in the US or if it's also just an obscure historical fun fact there x)

New Pagasa late votes conspiracy: they just wanted to deny themselves the chance of an AQ so they wouldn't have to try to somehow vote in both semis x

There were actually a few songs that we were split on this month but that wasn't one of them x (the one that caused the slight delay is also related to the debate over whether recycles of artists in different guises should count as veto points or not x (no it's not TOMORA either))

Me being the last country to confirm before the deadline and then opening semi 1 so yeah I know a good few of you will already know Searows but hopefully he'll be new to at least a few potential fans x Discovered him from the song 'Dirt' earlier this year which immediately caught my attention as a pretty beautiful slow burner, ended up deciding to go back and check out the previous singles and then the whole of his new album, this song came out last year and is a lot more ~explosive~ than most of the rest of the album which I hope will help out with making a stronger first impression. (It is also my favourite song on the album anyway). I believe he has been a tour opener for Ethel Cain and that makes sense x A fair few here I've heard already of which my favourite is Hendinia's which I expect will be landing them quite near the top of the scoreboard once again x Neat to see Nujabes (RIP x) being entered, I haven't dug into his music too much so haven't heard this song but I did come across one of his songs a long time ago which I considered sending myself, I'm actually not 100% sure which song it was oops but it was something off the Samurai Champloo soundtrack, might have been 'aruarian dance'? I also discovered during research for this contest (after missing it the last time she was entered) that Art School Girlfriend is a Persephonia alumnus of sorts - apparently she was a member of Deaf Club who I sent all the way back in BJSC 49 (2012) with the rather underrated and sadly still missing from Spotify 'Moving Still'!! Shook at this revelation. (TOMORA is a sorta-kinda Persephonia recycle too via Tom Rowlands as I've sent The Chemical Brothers to a spinoff before, I'll claim any tangential connection I can xo)

FWIW we are having some internal debate #exclusiveleaks over whether recycling an artist previously sent as part of a group should count as veto points or not. So Cherry Bomb ambiguously has 15 veto points or 0. But we decided to veto it regardless x (Not everything in the write-ups is a contributing reason for a veto, this was thrown out because it's - kind of - a winning artist recycle and her only other solo song is one that would definitely be vetoed for attracting too much attention on the site already which this song is too new to have accrued itself so it is slightly speculative but seemed fair nonetheless x)

Rik Waller's version is better than Whitney's let's be real. Voting for Kanye xxx

You can't send the same act twice in a row regardless xx

A few more hours for any further votes here

Lol @ 'Man I Need' popping up to #1 once again to further delay 'Rein Me In' finally getting there.

Well we're down to one of the songs I liked vs. the one I'm neutral on. I'll let you guess which way around they are! I do like 'American Boy' a lot too, although I will now never be able to hear it without thinking of the Fortnite parody version of it 'Chug Jug With You'. (although tbh that makes it better x)

Just need to acknowledge how much 'Really Hard' slaps.

Scenes when ROSALÍA just gets a bye from the last round as a result x

I think even when I did keep a longer list of potentials it never got longer than about 10 songs!

Voted I think I'm going to go against the grain again and say this was pretty easy to vote in - I knew which 5 songs I'd likely be voting for straight away, only the order of my top 2 was in doubt really. Though it was nice to hear another song by some of these artists and made a couple more pretty good discoveries, I think it'd be harder to pin down a 6th place here.

'Choosin' Texas' is still the only song I've really liked from her so far but 'Be Her' is not bad either, we've had Radio 2 on in the office at work this week and I've heard it on there a couple of times, it is very catchy. Could definitely see it eventually being another charting song for her (I saw it went top 20 in the US).

TIL that exists

Banned

Think 'Maybe' is one of the better solo Spice singles for me as well. Another one that I gave a 7 to but possibly the closest to an 8 out of the 7s I gave.

I imagine it can't be that common for the whole top 3 in this to be by male artists? x 'Berghain' re-entering

Only 3 songs from the album are in her current top 10 on Spotify, and the top two of those have their streams downweighted to the average of the rest of the album per UK chart rules. There's a pretty steep dropoff between the 3rd and 4th most popular songs and then again from the 4th most to the rest of the album, so the album's streaming sales per week are being pretty heavily carried just by 'Oscar Winning Tears.' and to a lesser extent 'The Thrill Is Gone.' ('Flip A Switch.' is surprisingly low down the pecking order considering it was a top 40 hit - mind this is based on global numbers but I wouldn't expect the UK numbers to have a significantly different trend). Taking current daily numbers from Kworb: 708k Escapism. 367k Worth It. 224k Oscar Winning Tears. 117k The Thrill Is Gone. 61k Ice Cream Man. 54k Flip A Switch. 42k Hard Out Here. 32k Black Mascara. And the rest are <25k. (Not counting alternate versions of the songs, but the only one of those that's over 25k daily is the sped up version of 'Escapism.' which already doesn't count, so the rest are pretty insignificant. Again rather surprised by how low the Coi Leray remix of 'Flip A Switch.' is, only 6k daily for that!)

I had forgotten how relatively little impact BTS' previous albums had tbf - odd that they didn't release a single ahead of this new album, I'm sure they would have had a stronger showing on streaming with just one new song to focus on, but overall it seems like the years away haven't really translated into that much of an increase in interest in this album compared to the previous one. I guess the fact that the various solo members have continued to release very frequently may have made it feel like a bit less of a huge comeback lol ~ Bella is on 684k today, not 647k. Still, that's a significantly smaller lead than she had over Sam's top version than this time last week (she has gone down and he has gone up) so last week might have been her peak. Sigh.

Surprising that they didn't playlist SIENNA SPIRO immediately but a B-List add in week 2 makes up for it somewhat I guess x Good to see ANOTR and Arlo Parks being added. I didn't care for that MUNA song when I first heard it but it's grown on me a lot now so happy to see it moving up too.

The contest they won was one with 12 DNQs per semi x