UNO News Net: HOT CELEBRITIES: Katy Perry's Roar on course to outsell Lady Gaga's Applause by double in first week with almost 450,000 download sales

Friday, August 16, 2013

HOT CELEBRITIES: Katy Perry's Roar on course to outsell Lady Gaga's Applause by double in first week with almost 450,000 download sales

Katy's new song Roar and Gaga's Applause were released this week, and early reports suggested they could be equally successful in first-week sales.
But new tracking information suggests the fight isn't even close.
Katy's track is cracking along toward 450,000 downloads by the end of the week, while Gaga's is estimated to sell between 200,000 to 250,000, according to Billboard.

'Roar' singer Katy Perry hides her face with her laptop case, while leaving a friend's house in West Hollywood.

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Though 200,000-plus is still impressive for first-week downloads, that figure pales in comparison to Gaga's 2011 single 'Born This Way,' which notched a staggering 448,000 downloads after only three days on sale, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Gaga and Katy weren't even planning on debuting their singles in the same week, but that changed when Gaga suffered an unexpected problem.
The singer slated Applause for an Aug. 19 release but changed it to Aug. 13 because of leaks on Saturday, according to The Week.

Roar also leaked on Saturday, though that didn't shift Katy's Aug. 12 release.
'Due to hackers an abundance of low/high quality leaks... We issue this pop music emergency... Monsters spread the word,' Gaga tweeted on Monday.
She also reached out to Katy with an offer: 'Wanna grab some shovels and f**k up some hackers?' she replied in a modified tweet to the pop star.

Feeling shy: Katy hides her face with her laptop case as she leaves a friend's home in West Hollywood on Thursday

Katy will have a slight advantage in the first-week sales battle, as Roar gets the benefit of seven full days of SoundScan tracking (which counts downloads from Monday-Sunday, despite the fact most artists drop singles on Tuesday).

Still, if the tracking is accurate, this will be the first time this year that multiple songs have passed the 200k-download mark in the same week.
Adele (Skyfall), Taylor Swift (Red) and One Direction (Live While We're Young) hit the goal in October 2012.
Roar and Applause are lead singles off the artists' respective albums - Katy's 'Prism' is due Oct. 22, while Gaga's 'ArtPop' is set to drop on Nov. 11. - but have received mixed early reviews.
Though many critics admit that Roar and Applause will soar on the pop charts, some were less pleased with the predictable sound of the singles.

Winner: Katy's new single should be another hit in her long line of chart-topping pop tracks

Spin's Marc Hogan, for one, noted that Gaga's track 'offers few reasons to clap' and criticized the song's 'relatively generic electro-pop pulse.'
And Billboard's Andrew Hampp pointed at Katy's 'easy clichés and rhymes' (including the line 'I went from zero/to my own hero') as a glaring weakness of her mid-tempo stomper.
Those flaws, however, won't matter with the kind of airplay both singles are primed to receive in coming weeks.