Billboard Update

Rihanna's sixth studio album Talk That Talk leaked the past week, but the lead single We Found Love has managed to collect another week atop the Hot 100, while Bruno Mars rockets into the Top 10 at #9 with It Will Rain, trailed closely by Taylor Swift's new tracks If This Was a Movie at #10, Ours at #13 and Superman at #26 while Katy Perry's The One That Got Away rises up to a new peak of #15. Christina Perri's A Thousand Years is also on the move up, moving up to #46. Jessie J's Domino moves up to #58 while Glee's Uptown Girl debuts at #68. Rihanna is genuinely the queen of the Hot 100 right now, with her new single You Da One arriving at #73 while Adele's Set Fire To The Rain re-enters at #89.

Mac Miller is at #1 on the albums chart while Michael Buble's annual album chart fest is in full swing with his Christmas album collects the Greatest Gainer Title and flies up to #2. The unstoppable Adele is a non-mover at #5 while Mariah Carey's Merry Christmas II You re-enters at the other side of the chart at #194.

One Direction - What Makes You Beautiful + Gotta Be You live @ Children In Need

One Direction have gotten everything right so far. They brushed up their looks, and genuinely improved since their shitty X Factor days when they were literally the worst boyband then, with no clear musical direction whatsoever. They decided to avoid the clubby/pop/dance genre dominated by JLS, and the straight up pop that The Wanted have nailed, and gone for a pop/rock sound, although a lot more pop than rock.

What Makes You Beautiful was ridiculously catchy enough to warrant the attention of casual buyers to make it become the fastest selling single in the UK this year. With Gotta Be You, it seems Rihanna has stolen their #1 lead when the latest midweek chart prediction came in. And thankfully she's done that because Gotta Be You is rather dire, especially the studio version.

Nevertheless, One Direction got to open the Children In Need show and failing to do as spectacularly as Cheryl Cole did last year, with What Makes You Beautiful and returning with Gotta Be You. Liam and Harry in particular sounded spectacular, Zayn was okay, Louis and Niall were disposable as always. You didn't even hear them at all.

But we saw that coming anyway.

The Saturdays - My Heart Takes Over live @ Children In Need

It's release week of My Heart Takes Over for The Saturdays, which is sitting at #13 on the midweek chart, and if it remains there, it would be their first single to miss the Top 10 since the fabulous Work in June 2009. So to drum up some sales, The Sats dropped by Children In Need to give a showing of the new single with Frankie present. She missed out on promotions for the single when they did Daybreak and Loose Women. My Heart Takes Over might look like it's a disaster for The Saturdays, breaking their Top 10 streak, but bear in mind their upcoming fourth album On Your Radar drops next week, so most casual buyers would be holding out to get the album. Furthermore, Westlife's lead single to what seems like their very last album, ever, Lighthouse is doing even worse than My Heart Takes Over. And when you're a boyband that's been around since forever and what could be your last single does even worse than a girl group that hasn't had a fraction of your sales, suddenly things don't look so bad.

But back to the Children In Need performance. Those dresses didn't flatter the girls, I'll have to admit. But since the One Direction boys got to open the show and performed two songs, I feel a bit miffed for The Sats. They should've knocked out All Fired Up to get the crowd going. In fact, that would've been a perfect opening to the show. Pfft. Boybands always have it easier.

Anyway, check out more of their recent live performances of My Heart Takes Over below. Their new album is good too. Apart from the singles, check out Faster, Get Ready Get Set, The Way You Watch Me (feat. Travie McCoy), Do What You Want With Me, White Lies and Last Call. Oh and if you don't like My Heart Takes Over, replace the album version with the Rokstone Mix. It's MUCH better.

Rihanna - We Found Love live @ The X Factor USA

Rihanna's We Found Love is genuinely SLAYING everywhere, what with snatching a #1 single away from boybands The Wanted (Lightning), JLS (Take a Chance on Me), and One Direction (Gotta Be You) if the latest midweek chart prediction holds true on the UK Singles Chart, while in the US she literally has no chart competition with Adele's Someone Like You starting to fall down the chart.

And she only just started promotions for the single.

The Bajan megastar took to The X Factor US stage to give the very first live showing of We Found Love. Coupled with a loud backing track and an oddly puffier face (not in a 'SHE GREW FAT'! way, mind), Rihanna jumped around like how you would at a rave when We Found Love starts blasting through the speakers.

Overall, it was an alright performance, rather messy at points, but for the first live showing of the song, it was good.

Selena Gomez - Hit The Lights [Music Video Premiere]

I'll admit, I don't really like Selena Gomez' latest album When the Sun Goes Down because it is what it is, a bunch of songs bigger pop artists rejected. Who Says was fine till she destroyed it with the awful live performances, Love You Like a Love Song was overrated and too robotic, but I'm afraid I'm quite liking the THIRD single Hit the Lights. It's remarkable because Hollywood Records tends to give up on an album after its second single, and promotion for the second single is usually rubbish so it flops (see: Hilary Duff's Stranger and Miley Cyrus' Who Owns My Heart). But Selena's fanbase has taken very well to Love You.. and sent the song to become another hit.

So Hollywood Records have finally started acting like an actual record label and released a third single. It's a move further into electro/pop territory and the further she ventures into this subgenre, the more I like it. Hit the Lights is very much a carefree number about living your life etc. without coming across cheesy to the point where its cringeworthy. And as with every Gomez video, there's always one look where she looks flawless and the rest I'm not too fond of. But overall, I don't like some of the camera angles and the behind the scenes video of the disco ball in the forest and the flashlights party in the middle of the road showed that they could've looked a lot better than those scenes actually did in the video.

Now if only Demi would hurry up with a second single already. All Night Long please.

Katy Perry - The One That Got Away [Music Video Premiere]

Katy Perry, after a successful 5 singles run of which all got to #1 in the US, and 2 of them, namely E.T. and Last Friday Night had Katy underhandedly bringing on rent-a-rappers to the tracks to help push the songs to #1. Ever since the overplayed disaster that is Firework, I've been terribly sick of anything Katy Perry, but what she has done, is excel at putting out truly stellar music videos to ease the pain our ears went through the many many times we turned on the radio to hear it playing Firework.

And with The One That Got Away, Katy's genuinely wrapping up the Teenage Dream era. The video, however, is very much Thinking of You 2.0, of which Thinking of You is by far better than anything she's done. And the tacky beat in The One That Got Away certainly doesn't help. But her stripped down performance of the track on The X Factor UK has made this song incredible, and just behind E.T. as her best single from this album era.

The video is painfully dramatic, but while Thinking of You was brutally sad, The One That Got Away tries its best and comes across second rate compared to Thinking of You. The only unexpected moment of the video came when "the one" drove off a cliff (anyone notice how the boulders in the road were perfectly placed RIGHT SMACK in the middle of the road?), and I would've started tearing if I didn't predict he'd die somehow or if I was a 13 year old girl. This video, much like Britney's Criminal, tries too hard to be overly dramatic to the point where all emotion is stripped away.

Also, someone needs to get rid of that cheap beat in the song.

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