Jive is mishandling Kris Allen's single release

I was hoping this would not happen, but it seems my fears are coming true regarding the manner in which Jive Records is handling the release of Kris Allen's debut single, "Live Like We're Dying," which does not bode well for his upcoming album release. In a puzzling move, Kris' single was made available for purchase to the digital music retailers iTunes and Amazon MP3 on Friday, which is a few days off the traditional Tuesday release day.

Although it's nice that the single is already available to fans eager to support Kris by purchasing his music, considering the single premiered only last Monday, there is absolutely no strategy here (at least not at first glance). First, with the lack of a visible ad for the single of some sort, both on the main Pop page and the coveted home page of iTunes' music store, the chances of the song making a splash in its opening week on both Billboard's Hot Digital Songs and Hot 100 charts decrease dramatically. If it does debut at all, it will be on the lower rungs of the chart, but considering it will have less than half a sales week to work with and it seems to have already peaked, it probably will not place on the Hot 100 this coming week. Evidence that this will be the case can be seen by looking at its performance over the past three days on iTunes' Top 200 overall songs chart.

After peaking at #28 on the overall chart yesterday (#15 on the Pop chart), "Live Like We're Dying" has dropped back to #47 on the overall chart (#22 on the Pop chart). Now, this can most likely be attributed to the lack of awareness on Jive's part. Yes, Kris tweeted about the single release and the hardcore fans (especially all of Arkansas) know about it, but the lack of airplay at this point doesn't help matters. So the question is, does Jive care about how it is handling Kris' single release? My guess is it does, but is just being really lazy, which is not a good sign.

This doesn't mean there won't be a huge (or multiple huge) ads alerting everyone about the release come Tuesday, but until then it is a little worrying that one of Idol's biggest winners in terms of votes garnered was only able to manage a preliminary peak at #28 on iTunes' chart. And this doesn't signal that "Live Like We're Dying" will fail as a single, because it is still very early in the game.

The point is, Jive is not handling this situation as well as it has handled the debut releases of Idol alums of yesterday (Jordin Sparks, David Archuleta). Hopefully they wake up at the wheel before Nov. 17 rolls around.

*Note: by saying the single has "peaked," I mean in the sense that it has peaked on its initial journey up the iTunes chart. I am in no way insinuating that "Live Like We're Dying" has peaked for good. That would be ridiculous.