The American (Idol) Revolution: Justin Time for Another Article
Bruce Barker
Foxes on Idol, May 30, 2003
www.foxesonidol.com/cgi-b...art&page=1
After Bruce’s last article, he heard from a number of Justin Guarini fans, upset
that Bruce said Justin’s summer did not look very bright. Now Bruce expands on why he said that and what you can do to change it for the better!
They will never forget you
‘til somebody new comes along
American Idol has ended its second season. I ended my own second season writing Idol columns for Foxes on Idol and was looking forward to a break before wearing out my keyboard with articles about the upcoming Cupid and For Love or Money shows. Within 48 hours of the appearance of what was supposed to be the last Revolution column, a couple of things happened.
First, as I had promised in the article, the contents of Clay Aiken’s debut single have been changed. “On the Wings of Love” has been replaced with “Bridge over Troubled Water.” The song, “This is the Night” is still included. If you ever wonder where to find real news about American Idol first, look no further than Foxes on Idol and RealityNewsOnline.
This change marks a first for fans of the Revolution. For the very first time since America’s fans realized they could really use American Idol to make a change in what we hear on the radio and buy in the record stores, a record company has changed a major decision because of the demands of the fans. Congratulations to the fans, who will now get an even better debut single from Mr. Aiken, and also to BMG music, RCA records, and 19 Entertainment for having the wisdom to give the people what they want! There will be some interesting new drama in a couple of weeks as the radio stations realize that both songs on the single are receiving numerous requests! Keep checking here at Foxes on Idol starting this weekend when I will begin a weekly column covering the chart successes, sales, radio airplay, and other news about the achievements of all our Idols.
The other thing that happened was that my mailbox quickly became crammed worse than it has after any other article I’ve written about the show. Some were letters from concerned Justin Guarini fans who wanted to know what they could do to ensure that their Idol has great success with his new album. Even more letters were from Justin fans who were outraged that I had so many negative things to say about their favorite singer. There were several people who stopped at merely questioning my sanity, and others who accused me of being from another planet entirely. I was shocked to find out that I had written an entire article slamming Justin and thought our hard-working editor David Bloomberg must have accidentally put my name on the wrong column, so I double-checked. The article is three pages long on the site (about seven manuscript pages, for those who keep track) and my comments about Justin were contained in just a couple of paragraphs. As I began to correspond with the people who had taken the time to write to me I realized I had made a mistake.
My comments and concerns about Justin’s future were dead on the mark, but I didn’t explain why I was so concerned. I wrote back to most of these fans explaining things in greater detail and several of them requested I write this column so that more of Justin’s fans can take action. Keep in mind that the tips I will be presenting at the end of this article will work for any singer, so use them to help your favorite Idol stay on top of the charts if you aren’t a big Justin Guarini fan.
First let’s examine why Justin may have a very long summer in front of him: This summer (June 13 to be exact) Justin makes his feature film debut. This should be a cause for celebration, but in this case it really isn’t. We are now a scant two weeks away from release date and it’s astonishing the number of things that are missing from a promotional standpoint.
There has been no one-sheet released on a national level. For those of you unfamiliar with movie marketing, one-sheets are the posters you see hanging up in movie theater lobbies. Typically, the studio’s marketing gurus ship out the one-sheets several months before a movie comes out in order to build excitement for the film. Hand in hand with one-sheets are the standees. A standee is a cardboard display advertising the release of an upcoming movie. Some of them are very elaborate and often take up six feet or more of floor space in a theater lobby. There are none for From Justin to Kelly. There has been no national preview trailer sent to theaters. Movie fans know full well that when they go to the movies the start time listed for a film is actually the time when the previews will start screening. During peak movie seasons there are often as many as seven or eight previews shown before a film finally begins. It’s yet another essential tool the studios use to get people excited and “buzzing” about an upcoming movie release.
There has been no television advertising to date. The only thing that has appeared on the tube has been a couple of brief clips shown during American Idol. Consider that we are already seeing television ads for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which doesn’t come out until July, and you can see that Fox has badly missed the boat in promoting From Justin to Kelly. There is no excuse for this. The release date of the movie has already been delayed, so there has been plenty of time to get a marketing campaign rolling.
Fox has finally put together something that resembles an official web site for the film. This is something that also should have been completed months ago. If you head over to the site you will quickly discover that most of it is still under construction. The first thing you will want to do is click on the “music” button to hear some of Kelly and Justin’s singing, right? Forget about it. It’s listed as “coming soon.” Want to download the preview that you haven’t been able to see anywhere else? Sorry, there isn’t even a link to it.
There will be no advance screening for critics. This might not seem like such a big deal, but to film critics it is like a flashing warning sign that the film is a piece of junk and the studio doesn’t want the critics to warn the public.
There are a limited number of movie theater screens in North America – about 34 thousand. That might seem like a lot, but we’re into the summer blockbuster season. Theater booking agents usually bring a hit movie into their multiplexes for a minimum of 3 to 5 weeks. When From Justin to Kelly gets released there will still be over 10 thousand screens filled with Matrix Reloaded, Bruce Almighty, and X-Men 2. In addition, Charlie’s Angels 2 will show up in over 3,000 theaters and most will be showing it on more than one screen. In short, theater screens are going to already be crowded and FJTK is going to have a hard time getting space in a lot of cities. You may want to see the movie, but you might have to drive an hour or more to find a theater that is playing it.
Add all this up and things do not look good for the success of FJTK at all. It may end up being a hit, but the odds are badly stacked against it.
But that’s okay, you think. His debut album is coming out on June 10th and will be a huge smash hit. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason Justin is being treated like a forgotten stepchild by the record company. Because of the time it took to make the movie, both Justin and Kelly couldn’t get into the studios to record albums. Any studio time they got was to record songs for the movie soundtrack. Don’t go looking for a soundtrack album though. There are no plans to release one.
Regardless, Kelly and Justin finally got to record their albums. Under the American Idol rules, Justin had to wait until Kelly’s debut had been in release for a month before his own album could come out. This was expected and is Kelly’s due as the winner of Season 1. But the delays have been so long that the winners of Season 2 have already been declared and will be releasing their first singles at virtually the same time as Justin’s album. As of this writing, Clay and Ruben hold down the top two presale slots at Amazon. Most people who buy CDs aren’t rich. They have limited money to spend on entertainment and a lot of them will be grabbing the cheaper CD singles instead of paying for a full album.
Justin was allowed to come on American Idol this season and sing. He performed twice within a month, in fact. He performed two different songs and Ryan Seacrest announced that each one of them would be his first single! This is almost catastrophic even without taking into account that Justin performed the exact same song as Clay Aiken. It doesn’t matter at all to his fans, because they’re going to buy the album anyway. But it will wreak havoc with radio station managers who now have no idea which song they are supposed to play.
Speaking of radio managers, a surprising number of them have no interest in playing Idol music. They feel the show is a television phenomenon and that the singers aren’t “real” performers. Kelly ran up against this problem when “A Moment Like This” came out and a number of stations ignored it until they got flooded with requests and the song had already cracked the top 10 on the Billboard charts. Now these same stations will be getting bombed with requests for Kelly’s “Miss Independent” as well as Ruben’s version of “Flying Without Wings.” In addition, the Clay Nation will be flooding the radio stations with requests for both “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “This is the Night.” It’s going to take a massive effort on the part of Justin Guarini fans just to get his first single played on the radio where people that don’t watch American Idol will finally get the chance to “discover” the curly-haired crooner. After the deluge of mail I received from people aged 12-50 who feel that Justin is the next best thing to Elvis Presley, I have little doubt in my mind his fans are up to the task. Now if only they could know for sure what song to request!
For the past three months Clay and Ruben have been performing at least twice a week in front of more than 20 million fans. As a result they are hot as lava right now. For the next couple of months they will be touring America with the other Idol finalists and singing to additional thousands of people every night. Their first singles are going to scorch the charts. Other than the couple of times he appeared on American Idol 2, Justin hasn’t been in the public eye much since the first Idol tour wound up. There has been no announced Justin Guarini concert tour to promote his album.
The fact of the matter is, if you aren’t an American Idol fan it is unlikely you will even be aware that Justin’s album is coming out. When Thankful was released, Kelly already had her first hit single under her belt. She had a built-in base of fans from American Idol, as well as a number of new fans that “discovered” her when “A Moment Like This” was on the radio and MTV. As a result, her album debuted at number 1. Justin has a large number of fans because of American Idol and most experts are predicting his album will debut somewhere in the top 10 as a result. This is good news indeed. But once again, the horrible timing of everything and the bad decisions by his record company might come back to haunt Justin.
The days of the hit single are long gone. Twenty years ago, recording artists made millions on hit single sales alone. Now most companies don’t even bother with them. The sole purpose of the “single” nowadays is to get the artist heard on the radio so that people who like the song will run out and buy the album. Without a steady stream of new singles being played on the radio, an album is usually doomed. A good example of this can be seen by looking at Avril Lavigne and Vanessa Carlton.
Right now Lavigne’s third radio single, “I’m With You,” has fallen out of the top 40 and most radio stations aren’t playing it very much. As a result, her album had fallen out of the top 40 as well. This week radio stations were informed which song will be her next release and when it starts getting played it will drag her album back up the charts with it.
On the other hand, Vanessa Carlton saw her album sales soar while her song, “A Thousand Miles,” was all over the radio, but she’s been unable to get a second solid hit from her album. At present, even though “A Thousand Miles” is still in the top 10 on some of the radio charts, the album has fallen out of the top 100 and is selling less than 5,000 copies a week. Unless she comes up with something truly sensational with her follow-up album, her career may be over.
If Justin fails to get heard on the radio, you can count on his album landing in the top 10 and then falling quicker than a house of cards in an earthquake. His fans will snap up the CD in the first week or two (at least those who haven’t already ordered it online will) and there will be nobody left to keep sales going after that point. In today’s music scene, nothing will earn you the “flash in the pan” or “one hit wonder” label quicker than an album that performs in such a manner.
So What Can You Do To Help Justin?
Are you Justin’s biggest fan? It’s time to prove it. Justin Guarini fans are going to have to do what his “handlers” have failed to do. At this point they have botched the marketing of his movie and fumbled badly with promoting his record. Instead of a smooth waltz into the spotlight, Justin now faces a very big uphill battle. Here are a few things you can do to help push him up that hill:
Get organized. Start hitting the newsgroups and chat rooms and get together with other Justin fans.
Contact Justin’s record company (info@rcarecords.com) and ask them some blunt questions like:
What is Justin’s Guarini’s first single?
Is there a “street team” to join and help promote the album?
When will his first video debut? Will Justin be going on tour?
If so, when?
What television shows will he be performing on?
Will he be performing with or without Kelly Clarkson?
What can I do to help promote the album?
If they receive a large number of e-mails they will come to realize that rather than having forgotten Justin, his fans have been waiting patiently to continue the process of making him a superstar.
If you haven’t done it already, buy his album!
Get people in your area to call the local movie theaters and ask them if they will be getting From Justin To Kelly. It’s late, but if they get flooded with enough calls they will try to bring the movie in for at least one week. If requests for copies of the movie increase enough the studio will finally wake up and start pushing the movie along with some ads and promotions. Go to the official website for the movie at least once per day. If the site gets a big increase in “hits” the webmaster will tell the studio that the movie is starting to catch on and that will help item #4 above.
Once you know what his single is going to be start, peppering the radio stations with requests to hear it. As I mentioned at the start of this article, Foxes on Idol will have a weekly column tracking the chart successes of each of the American Idol contestants this summer, including the box office report for From Justin to Kelly. I will make certain to let everyone know what Justin’s single releases are going to be as soon as I have the reliable information, so keep checking right here for the latest.
If you have a webpage, or know how to make one, start up a fansite and let RCA records know about it. The more fansites a singer has, the more likely he is to be able to keep recording. [Editor’s Note: Just remember to link to Foxes On Idol from your site!]
If and when a Justin video becomes available, call MTV’s Total Request Live and vote for it! This might seem like a given, but I got a lot of mail from Justin fans who never watch MTV and this idea is something they may not think of.
Justin has several TV appearances scheduled but virtually all of them are with Kelly Clarkson to plug the movie. Whenever he appears on a show, whether it’s Regis, Letterman, or Leno, send e-mails to the show and tell them you really want to see Justin come back on and sing something from his hit album.
Go to the official American Idol website, as well as the official American Juniors website and send comments and e-mails about how much you would like to see Justin make a guest appearance on the show(s).
Play the CD whenever you have someone in the car with you or visiting at your home. Don’t make a major announcement about it, just stick it in and let it spin. When your guests ask you what album it is, just say, “It’s Justin Guarini, the guy you said you were sick of hearing about. Pretty good, isn’t it?” It may seem silly, but if enough people get that CD heard amongst their friends, it will make a large impact on the sales charts.
Write or send e-mails to music magazines like Rolling Stone, requesting stories about and interviews with Justin. Acting alone, these tips won’t do a bit of good, but if Justin’s fans come out together and support this release, it will help ensure that Mr. Guarini is still releasing records long after the first curly gray hairs have shown up on his head. So what are you waiting for? Isn’t there someone you should be sending an e-mail to? Don’t you have some phone calls to make? Why are you wasting your time here? Work hard and it will be a Guarini Summer. Justin time, if you ask me.
There’s a new kid in town
Everybody’s talkin’ about the New kid in town