As September‘s UK career lies in limbo, have a listen to what could have been. The album, which was due to come out in August, then cancelled, then reinstated as a download only release, has gone and leaked on to the internet. Meaning that you can all listen to ‘Leave It All Behind’ in full now. This was supposed to be the single which was released before the album came out, but it was dropped in favour of her older Swedish hit, ‘Until I Die’. Then when Radio 1 refused to playlist ‘Until I Die’, Hard2Beat pulled the plug on it two weeks ago.
Why they went with ‘Until I Die’ over ‘Leave It All Behind’ is beyond us. Why they then cancelled the release of ‘Until I Die’ altogether, rather than just making it a (cost and face salvaging) download only release (given that artwork for the single had already been completed, remixes been paid for, promos sent out, and with the video already on rotation on tv) is also beyond us. After all, they applied that ‘download only’ logic to the album – which however, is another huge mistake given that album sales follow a completely different logic to single sales. Whilst downloads make up around 98% of all single sales these days, the albums market is still heavily reliant on physical units – only 14% of album sales are digital. As a result, any album not given a physical release is highly likely to flop on its arse. And unfortunately, we get the feeling that this album’s non-performance next month will be used as an excuse to abort the project completely and drop the poor lady.
*sigh*
Anyway, here’s the one good thing to come out of this mess;
We have no doubt that September will easily pick herself up, get back to Sweden, and make the best pop album of her career after all of this. It’s just a shame that her UK experience will be marred, and said pop album of the future probably won’t get picked up in the UK, because of what hasty decisions have been made in the last two weeks.