Justin isn’t the only person celebrating a #1 song on iTunes this week. One Direction‘s newest release “Diana” has reached #1 on EVERY COUNTRY except Lithuania. Now that’s a lot of countries! Should we be worried that “PYD” didn’t do as well?
There’s a new arrival in the UK Top Ten this week, but some of you may already know his name. Justin Bieber is the 16-year-old Canadian R&B sensation who’s taken the US by storm, causing teen hysteria and near riots whenever he appears.
Having scored a minor hit in January with his single One Time, Justin looks set to repeat his American success with his current track Baby featuring rapper Ludacris, and his upcoming album My World 2.0.
Still none the wiser? Don’t panic. Here’s a handy set of Bieber facts you can drop in to any conversation and impress your friends:
Justin Bieber was discovered singing on YouTube, in videos he’d originally posted just for his friends and family to watch.
Not just a singer and a nifty mover, Justin can play the drums, guitar, piano and trumpet. (Though not all at the same time.)
Justin was signed to his record label by R&B superstar Usher, reportedly after a bidding war with Justin Timberlake. The Bieber family then upped sticks to live near Usher, in Atlanta.
A promotional appearance in a Long Island shopping mall had to be cancelled when 3000 fans turned up, causing mayhem and destruction. 35 police units were called in and Justin was prevented from entering the building. He later told a radio station: “They basically threatened to put me in cuffs and send me away to jail.”
Bieber’s first tour in the UK was in support Taylor Swift. He has also performed for President Obama and took Lionel Richie’s original line in the Haiti benefitting remake of We Are The World.
Consider yourselves educated in the ways of Bieber.
Bieber Mania is growing on Twitter
Two weeks ago, the 16-year-old pop singer from Stratford, Ont., was the No. 1 most tweeted about topic on the social media site, according to the tracking website www.whatthetrend.com. Last week he settled for second behind a little event called the Oscars.
Bieber has been on Twitter almost a year, but it wasn’t until January that his popularity growth really started registering, said Ingo Muschenetz of What The Trend.
As of mid-Friday, Bieber was ranked among the top 140 most popular Twitter users.
He averages about 11,000 new followers every day, which on Friday helped him pass the influential tech blogs TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider.
If his Twitter account’s growth continues its frenetic pace, he’ll likely crack the Top 100 by April. But it would still take months to approach the Top 10, an elite group with more than three million followers, such as Lady Gaga, John Mayer, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, Britney Spears and the top dog, Ashton Kutcher.
Talented, adorable, and now generous!
Arthur Christmas, the upcoming animated holiday movie about the Claus family’s bungling, big-hearted black sheep son, had been turning in a respectable but unremarkable performance on our Anticipation Index, hovering around the middle of our top-100 most buzzed-about upcoming projects.
That is, until Bieber got involved.
After he tweeted yesterday that the video for his next single off Under the Mistletoe (“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”) would premiere before Arthur Christmas screenings nationwide, the movie shot up to third on the Index. Right behind Bieber!
Enjoy it while you can, Arthur. Only a lucky few ever make it that close to the Biebs.
Until this week, only four acts had ruled the still-young Social 50 chart: Rihanna, the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. But now, we have a new No. 1 artist: Selena Gomez.
And, in an ironic twist, Gomez takes the crown by bumping her boyfriend, Justin Bieber, out of the top slot, and sends him to No. 2.
Gomez skips 5 to 1 this week thanks to online buzz generated by the release of her third album, “When the Sun Goes Down,” on June 28.
The Social 50 ranks the most active artists on the world’s leading social networking sites — YouTube, Vevo, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and iLike — using a formula blending weekly additions of friends/fans/followers along with weekly artist page views and weekly song plays.
What did it take for Gomez to dethrone the Biebs?
First, all of the promotion leading up to her album’s release, along with the success of its single “Love You Like a Love Song” helped. The latter has already garnered 10 million views on Vevo. In addition, the July 1 premiere of her romantic comedy “Monte Carlo” didn’t hurt either.
There’s also a candid YouTube video — uploaded on June 28 — where Gomez met her longtime crush, “Transformers” star Shia LaBeouf. It has since earned 6.1 million views, respectively (a 146% week-to-week increase). That same day, she also performed another of the new album’s hit singles, “Who Says,” on “Regis and Kelly.” (Also that same day, her “Track-by-Track” video interview with Billboard.com debuted.)
These events, among a dozen others, helped Gomez garner 27,000 new YouTube subscribers; 209,000 Facebook fans and 110,000 Twitter followers.
The Jo-Bros still have fans…just a lot less than they used to! In fact, according to a new report, they’ve been forced to cancel sixteen shows in their summer tour!
This seems to be a common trend in music right now, with American Idol execs canceling eight of their dates for the Idols Live tour, and huge stars like Rihanna and Christina Aguilera doing the same.
This is a huge difference from just last year, when the Jonas Brothers were selling out huge arenas to screaming tweens. But everyone gets replaced by someone younger and fresher, and in their case, it’s the Bieb.
Justin Bieber seems to be gaining momentum with each passing day, and he’s on his “My World” tour pretty much through the end of the year. He’s playing over 60 venues through December, and by the looks of it, none have been canceled.
Bieber’s rise to fame reminds us a lot of the Jonas Brothers, who once enjoyed their throne as the princes of pop. So it just makes us wonder….will Justin Bieber be the next one replaced?
Justin Bieber, the teenage pop singer, has become the biggest star on the internet.
The 16-year-old Canadian has taken over from Lady Gaga as the person who features in the most web searches. Bieber, who was discovered on YouTube, is getting three times as many searches as footballer David Beckham, despite being relatively unheard of in the UK, according to website Ask Jeeves. The site, which deals with questions about his music and love life, said: “It’s as though to millions he only exists on the net.”
It is not the first example of Bieber’s huge popularity on the internet. He topped Twitter’s list of “trending topics” for several months earlier this year. In April this year he came seventh – bizarrely – on a list of the 50 most popular women on the internet, compiled by COEDMagazine.
He has also been the subject of several internet hoaxes and hacks. Hackers managed to abuse a flaw in the YouTube site which allowed them to redirect users to adult sites and send them fake pop-up messages. Several of Bieber’s music videos were targeted, with abusive comments about the singer appearing beneath certain clips and banner messages appearing claiming the singer was dead.
It was the latest in a series of internet pranks against the young singer, whose ‘My World Tour’ page on his website has become the target of an international joke, after a public vote was posted asking where Bieber should tour next – with no restrictions on location.
The despotic North Korea, followed by Israel, has topped the list, with just over half a million votes having been cast. The singer was forced to tweet confirming he is alive.