Place your bets now on who will have the No. 1 record this week, but the music industry on the whole is on its knees praying that today's onslaught of major album releases will amount to big business -- the kind that might save a drowning industry.
Foremost among the albums hitting shelves/playlists today are: Rihanna's "Rated R," helped along by the all the media coverage as she speaks up about her with Chris Brown (plus she was a big name to begin with); "For Your Entertainment," the debut album from "American Idol" runner-up and last night's best stage humper and S&M purveyor on the American Music Awards, Adam Lambert; "She-Wolf" by Rolling Stone cover girl and perennially superstar-on-the-cusp-of-a-breakout Shakira; the second second best-of set from Britney Spears, "The Singles Collection," hyped along by two new tracks; Lady Gaga's new 8-song EP, "The Fame Monster," which is being sold individually or packaged as a double-disc with her full album "The Fame"; plus the odd duck out, "I Dreamed a Dream," by the famously frumpy and stage-shy "Britain's Got Talent" star Susan Boyle.
Not to be overlooked, today also sees the release of a new Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' new "Live Anthology," Timbaland's "Shock Value" and Jay Sean's "All or Nothing" -- all of which could've gone No. 1 any other week.
My money is on Boyle to top the charts. Seriously. And how funny would that be? That kind of schmaltzy stuff sells in droves, plus most of the other acts on this list are good at selling singles, not albums. Granted, Boyle's album cover isn't as flashy and sexy as Rihanna's or Lambert's covers (which, as you can see above, both involve a weirdly similar pose; not to mention a similar heavy dosage of makeup).
Anyone else who gives a squat want to make a guess who the top dog will be, and why? And does anyone actually believe that -- aside from Rihanna's disc -- any of those big discs will actually be any good?
