The Adult Contemporary MUSIC RESEARCH Letter

Eric Norberg's Weekly Commentary

A part of each issue of The Adult Contemporary MUSIC RESEARCH letter is Eric's commentary. Here's this issue's comment:

None of the new releases this week attained "recommended" status in their first tests, but we'll keep testing the ones that tested highest.

Meantime, in its third test, one recent release DID make it up to the "recommended for your AC playlist" scoring level -- BEGIN AGAIN by Colbie Caillat, on Universal. That keeps Colbie's string of successes for the AC core female listener intact. We might add that this track reached us from a subscriber, and we always appreciate submissions, so that we can keep our test data as up to the minute as possible. If we haven't gotten it, we can't test it! We accept submissions from anyone, not just subscribers, and a song doesn't even have to be targeted specifically to AC for us to test it. We are concerned only with what the AC core female listener likes and doesn't, of the new releases -- not what might have been in the head of the people who make the recordings!

We test each song from the beginning (no hooks), and keep playing the song till the panel is ready to move on. If they don't want to hear a song all the way through yet, it cannot yet be "recommended", for obvious reasons. If there are no negatives to the song, though, it is scored as "borderline" -- meaning, don't play it yet -- but we will keep re-testing it for possible increased appeal with exposure. Perhaps 5% of "borderline" songs eventually move up; most don't, so it is NOT a good idea to give airplay to a song that tests below the "recommended" level.
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A new album has been released in Africa by NiaNell! Suffice it to say that the only artist in the world who can be compared with Celine Dion for the AC format -- but who also composes and produces (and owns) her own recordings, and has the highest hit percentage on all her albums than any other artist we've ever tested -- offers her fifth album, and it is probably her best.  The artist is South Africa's NiaNell, and the new album is "Sand And Water". From the SIX "recommended"-testing tracks we started with the one that tested the very strongest -- UNTIL I'M HOME. Since this is currently completely unavailable in the Western Hemisphere, we are happy to send a stereo broadcast-quality MP3 of this song to any radio station wanting to consider it for airplay (or label interested in considering releasing her in the Western Hemisphere). Just e-mail us and ask us for it. You will need to give us an e-mail account to send it to that can accept at least a 10 MB e-mail.

NiaNell e-mails that this album is her favorite, too, of her five -- and as usual she wrote or co-wrote all the songs on the album -- except the title track, "Sand and Water", "composed by my idol, Beth Nielsen Chapman". She advises that, even though Sony Africa has released her last three albums, they have simply been the distributor for them, and, she says, "I do own all my own albums, and I have all the international rights to my albums. So I simply need to find a label in North America to release them -- absolutely no strings attached to any label in South Africa. I would love to have an international release, and we could pick the best songs from my albums and release a hit album over there! I'm doing very well in South Africa -- one of my albums is Gold and three are Platinum. The Gold album will be Platinum soon. I have steady and long-lasting sales over here, because my music is timeless." We agree.  We will be happy to supply her e-mail address to interested radio and music personnel.
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                 SPECIAL UNRESTRICTED DOWNLOAD
One of 2009's top AC hits, recommended as a "recurrent/oldie" to use for years to come, is I DREAMED A DREAM -- the astonishing live audition of an unprepossessing 47-year-old Scottish villager, Susan Boyle, for a TV program called "Britain's Got Talent". The YouTube video scored over 60 million views, and in addition to its great appeal to the AC core female listener, it was the subject of TV coverage and news reports around the world. If you're one of the few who hasn't ever seen the video, or heard its story, here's the link:

         http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

This LIVE performance was never commerically released as a CD single, but since you'll need it in your future programming for years to come, you can download a ZIP file containing the MP3 audio of this performance by clicking HERE.
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We've saved some recent past commentaries which seem to us to have ongoing relevance; click here to check them out!

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