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Behold and Fear the Power of Justin Bieber Beliebers

If you have a young teen or tween in your life, you already know that this is an epic week: 16-year-old Canadian pop superstar Justin Bieber’s second album,  (sequel to last November’s ), was released yesterday. Actually, you don’t even need a minor around to tell you what a major deal this kid has become: He’s on the current cover of Billboard; “My World 2.0” takes the lead review spot in the latest Rolling Stone (it got three stars); he’s done a live-performance residency on QVC; charmed the ladies of “The View”; and rocked Letterman last night with a high-energy performance — complete with a synchronized dance routine straight out of the Backstreet-meets-‘NSYNC playbook — of his hit single “Baby.”

Which brings us to this week’s Trendrr charts. A few notes and observations:

  • Bieber’s been pretty much unstoppable as a Twitter meme since January. His recent one-day peak: Sunday, Feb. 28, when 84,846 tweets name-checked him. Over the past couple of months he’s essentially become a permanent feature of Twitter’s “Trending Topics” list.
  • He’s held the No. 1 spot almost every Friday in our weekly  (only the Oscars were able to displace him, by a slight margin, to No. 2 a couple weeks back).
  • Justin Bieber

    Justin Bieber

  • He’s been chewing up a truly mind-boggling amount of bandwidth in the streaming-media realm. Yesterday, he set a record for himself at Last.fm: 1,854,917 plays of his songs within a single 24-hour period.
  • Of course, you saw all this coming if you read my  last November. Rettenmund called YouTube phenomenon Bieber the next biggest thing after “Twilight” (and hours after I spoke with him, the police pulled the plug on Bieber’s appearance at a Long Island mall thanks to a crush of 3,000 fans causing near-riot-like conditions).
  • BREAKING NEWS! (It’s related to that mall mob.)
  • Bieber may be the biggest legit pop star ever created by YouTube. Other viral-video phenomena have garnered more views over time, but in terms of transitioning from genuine obscurity to massively monetizable pop superstardom, Bieber is unmatched. Three years ago he was a kid living in a small town in Stratford, Ontario. After competing in something called “Stratford Idol,” he put some of his surprisingly soulful covers of songs by the likes of Usher and Ne-Yo on YouTube, garnering more than 10 million views before getting signed by, yes, Usher. (By the time “My World” came out last November, he’d surpassed 100 million YouTube views.) As he notes rather hilariously on his MySpace page (Bieber was just 13 when this was all happening), “I sang for Usher, and his people and he really wanted to sign me then and there, but I still had a meeting with Justin Timberlake, who also wanted to sign me. It turned out Usher’s deal was way better.” (Go, player!) He went on to become the first solo artist in history to send four songs into Billboard’s Top 40 before his debut album was even released.
  • Speaking of YouTube, you totally have to watch this (if you haven’t already seen it on Jimmy Kimmel):. And then watch this:. Yeah, Bieber’s locked up the pre-pre-tween demographic as well.
  • I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love this: Eight days ago, the hashtag trend #Lilyallenfatwhore hit Twitter’s Trending Topics list. Why? Because on March 12, British pop star Lilly Allen tweeted: “Justin bieber should have kiddie bras on the merch stall…. Ha” — which caused Justin Bieber fans to go ballistic, with one of them creating the #Lilyallenfatwhore Twitter meme with the hopes that it would go viral. (Naturally, it did.) Word to the wise: Do not eff with the Beliebers!
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