Former Girls Aloud singer Cheryl has been savaged after the disappointing reaction to her comeback single – is her days as a pop star numbered?
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The eagerly anticipated comeback of Girls Aloud star Cheryl (nee Tweedy) has been branded a massive flop after her new single in four years, Love Made Me Do It, stumbled into the UK charts at 19 before falling to 48 the following week.
Or so the press would have us believe.
The shock reports follow a controversial high profile appearance on ITV’s The X Factor. While an appearance on the show traditionally sends a song hurtling straight to No. 1 within minutes of airing, Cheryl had her comeback TV performance universally savaged by viewers online, who thought her vocals weren’t up to scratch, with some branding her performance “painful and embarrassing”.
This disappointing chart performance also came days after she pledged in an interview that if she didn’t have a hit with her new single, she would quit music altogether.
„If it goes in at 80, it’s time for me to move on with my life,” she told Guide magazine.
“I’m not going to jump around working hard and spending time away from my son for that.“
This appears to have been a make or break project for Cheryl, who has, since her last album was released in 2014, ditched her old management team, Modest and her record label Polydor
These days Cheryl is signed to dance label 3Beat, a subsidiary of Universal, and is managed by her old PA Lily England, who admitted in a recent interview with Music Week that Cheryl was testing the waters with this new single before committing to a long player.
“Right now we’re not planning an album,” she said. “She doesn’t really have any streaming numbers because that all started after she’d finished releasing four years ago. So we’re going to go song by song and see how it goes.”
So will Cheryl let this bump in the road put her off music for good?
Well, I certainly hope not, because over the years she has served us up her fair share of bone fide pop corkers like Fight For This Love, Parachute, I Don’t Care and Call My Name.
And, more importantly, her chart performance isn’t actually as bad as the press would have us believe and think Chezza has been attacked unfairly.
While the press have been fixated on numbers, we have to take into account, that the music industry is a totally different beast to the one we knew before.
When once songs were promoted for months before release, now they are made available to stream BEFORE the hard work starts. This means it might take a further few weeks or months for a song to climb the chart.
Yes, Ariana Grande’s latest single may have entered the chart recently at No. 1, but that’s a rare feat!
Hugely successful singer Olly Murs’ latest track Moves actually missed the top 40, while Paloma Faith’s new offering failed to enter the top 100 even after a performance on Strictly, the highest rated show on the box.
Even stars like sensations Kylie, Steps and Zayn Malik have failed to pierce the upper end of the singles chart in spite of shifting loads of albums and selling out tour dates.
The charts just aren’t like what they used to be. Streaming music is the new way of listening to music. Sales of CDs are down to an all time low (down 41% since 2017)
According to the Official Chart website, the average No 1 single tends to sell between 100,000 and 110,000 copies a week, while you have needed to shift around 7,500 to 8,000 copies to make the top 40.
