After a confusing and slightly vague announcement from t.A.T.u. about going on hiatus the future of the group seemed uncertain, so the Lena & Yulia took to Youtube to wish their fans a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, and also to clarify the rumors of them splitting up. They begin speaking in English at 0:58 if you want to watch it yourself.

“We would like to say that last year was really difficult and there was a lot of problems going on with different talks, like not true, so we wanted to say that we’re together and everything’s ok and we’re working on different new stuff, so next year we will try to do all our best for you to be happy. Thank you for your support”.

From what I can decipher from Lena’s patchy English I think that they’ll be working on solo projects during 2010, and then returning in 2011 with the next t.A.T.u. album. It’s nice to know that my fave girl group will be back at some point!

Are you checking for their solo careers though? Supposedly Lena (the red head) is working on her solo album with the same people behind t.A.T.u.’s music, whereas Yulia is doing her own solo project completely separate from t.A.T.u.’s management. Both albums should be interesting.

R&B/Soul songstress Melanie Fiona has defied the odds and scored her first #1 single with “It Kills Me”  knocking Trey Songz off the top of R&B/Hip-Hop singles chart.

This is an amazing accomplishment considering lack of promotion, and that Melanie’s debut album The Bridge was pushed back repeatedly and leaked about 5 months before it’s US release, as well as her first single “Give It to Me Right” failing to do much on the charts.

“It Kills Me” is also nominated for a Grammy in the category of “Best Female R&B Vocal Performance”.

Women like Melanie and LeToya have triumphed against adversity this year proving that sometimes all you need is good music. Congratulations to Melanie and hopefully this can be her first chart topper with many more to come!

In case you haven’t noticed by now I’ll use any excuse that I can in order to post a picture of Pamela Anderson.

Anyways I’ve done several lists to cap off the decade so far, and here is my final one “The top 21 best songs of the decade”.

This is more of a personal list rather than me trying to say that this is the be all and end all of best songs, so that’s why you won’t see the obvious choices like Alicia Keys “No One” and Britney Spears “Toxic” etc.

I hope you enjoy it and leave a comment to let me know your personal list!

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Though a lot of people have been unnecessarily negative (aka jealous) towards Susan Boyle lately, Lady GaGa is certainly not one of them, defending the 48-year-old chart topper in a new interview.

“I love Susan Boyle. She is my woman of the year. She has achieved more in this year than most artists will in a lifetime.

“This time last year nobody even knew who she was and now she is knocking the world’s most established artists off the album and singles charts.”

In fact GaGa admires Auntie Susie so much that she’s even willing to do a duet with the singer.

“Our styles are different. I don’t know if we could work together, but never say never. It would be great to work with somebody of that talent.”

I’m so happy that GaGa said this. So many people are being negative towards Susan acting like she doesn’t deserve her success, or playing it down like she isn’t beating out these younger artists by that much. Well face the facts people because she’s outselling ya faves by millions and she has Lady GaGa and 50 Cent publicly admitting that they’d love to work with her.

Why can’t the negative people out there just accept that Susan Boyle achieved her dream, AND she did it with a good album. It may not be a good album to some, but it sure is to millions of other people. Kids these days act like once you reach forty you’re suddenly past your use-by-date and become irrelevant which is completely untrue.

Susan Boyle covered a Rolling Stones classic “Wild Horses” and did it better than the original. How many other artists could outdo the Rolling Stones on their own song? Even Alicia Keys & Adam Levine did a duet of that song and couldn’t do it as good as Susan.

Susan Boyle deserves all her success, her album is good and people just need to deal with it because she’s here to stay. She’s sold like five or six million albums in about in as many weeks. Who else could do that today?

After months of waiting one of the best songs from Cassie’s Electro Love album “Sky Diver” has finally leaked in full.

The urban-pop flavoured mid-tempo was produced by Chris ‘n’ Teeb (Jennifer Lopez, Ciara) and penned by James Fauntleroy (Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears).

This song is so damn good. In fact I think it’s up there with one of the best tunes she’s ever done and if Cassie wasn’t such chart poison I could definitely see it being a hit single.

And the imaginary Grammy for album of the year goes to Electro Love…

I was kind of half-joking when I said that Ke$ha would be able to rival Lady GaGa, but now it looks like she just might be able to after breaking the female digital download record this week with her single “Tik ToK” selling 610, 000 digital tracks to remain at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Ke$ha has now beaten the previous female record which was held by Lady GaGa’s “Just Dance” which sold 419k exactly a year ago this week.

The overall record for the most sales belongs to Flo-Rida’s “Right Round” with 636k, which features you guessed it — Ke$ha. Unfortunately though Ke$ha requested not to have a feature credit on the song because she didn’t want it to distract from her official debut, but if she had been credited she would’ve had the top two spots the list.

Now all that Ke$ha needs to do is to prove that she isn’t a one-hit-wonder by following the song up with another hit, which is something that Lady GaGa has already done (several times over). Do you think she can pull it off?

Christina Aguilera’s rep has confirmed to US Weekly that the blonde bombshells fourth album will be due out in Spring (March-May).

We also have another collaborator to chalk down onto the endless list that Aggie has recruited for her new album, with the lead singer of indie-rock band The Bravery Sam Endicott confirming that he penned a track for Xtina’s new album called “Monday Morning”, with Switch handling the production.

Besides his work with The Bravery Sam also penned two tunes from Shakira’s latest album, “Men In This Town” and “She Wolf”. As for Switch, well, he’s the guy who’s worked with M.I.A. and Santigold but I’m sure you knew that already.

I don’t want to overreact or anything but so far her new record sounds like it’s going to be mind blowingly amazing! I’m also excited for her new movie with Cher Burlesque which is going to come out next year a little after her album drops. Now let’s just hope and pray it’s more Purple Rain than it is Glitter!

Susan Boyle shows no signs of slowing down in her fourth week on the charts, with HitsDoubleDaily reporting that the Scottish singer is set to sell another 520k of her debut album I Dreamed a Dream, pushing her total sales to over 3 million copies in the States alone.

This may be good news for Auntie Susie, but it’s not so great for Mary J.Blige who’s new album Stronger With Each Tear now has to settle for a #2 debut with roughly 340k sold.

Alicia Keys, who debuted last week at #2 with her new album The Element of Freedom, stands at #3 with 270-280k, down just slightly from last week’s 417k bringing her two-week total close to 700k.

Carrie Underwood is also set to sell another 150k of her third album Play On, which is easily enough to give the album a Platinum certification for sales of over 1 million.

Susan has now destroyed MJB and AK, and it looks like Taylor Swift will be her next victim because the two are currently neck-and-neck for the top selling album of 2009. Good on her!

After a heated and public beef that started over Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” and escalated from there, producer Scott Storch has finally buried the hatchet with Timbaland after getting clean in rehab and re-evaluating his life.

“We’re friends. He talks with me. He cares about me. We had a pretty serious friendship too that the world doesn’t really realize. That outweighs that lil’ bulls**t that we went through. Ultimately, I think we had a lot of people in our ear that were trying to create animosity between us and that’s how everything got started. We both started spewing out [ill] feelings and whatever. We both admitted to being wrong in that situation. That’s history though.”

I never thought that someone with an ego as big as Timbalands could forgive Scott who accused him of taking credit for not only his beats, but also Danja’s, but I guess it’s all water under the bridge now.

In other news Storch confirmed that he’s just finished working with Jennifer Hudson, which unfortunately will appear on a Quincy Jones tribute album and not Jennifer’s next record. Ne-Yo is one of the only confirmed collaborators so far for Jennifer’s sophomore album. Who else would you like to see her work with?

Just as I thought now that the late Brittany Murphy has been laid to rest more information is leaking about her mysterious debut album, which she was working on-and-off on for several years before her untimely death.

In a new interview with People magazine DJ Paul Oakenfold who worked with the actress on their hit single “Faster Kill Pussycat” has opened up about the direction of Brittany’s unreleased album.

“She would have done well,” Oakenfold says. “She wanted to try this with me, this smoky blues sound with electronic rhythms. She wanted to sound more traditional originally but I told her we should go more edgy. She was really excited by that and it’s just a shame it never got as far as people thought it could. It’s just a shame that the world is not going to hear more songs of Brittany Murphy.”

“Brittany trained as a singer before she did as an actress,” Oakenfold says. “She was a great actress but she had great vocal potential.”

He also admitted that the 32-year-old was reluctant to attach her name to “Faster Kill Pussycat” after she had been doing anonymous uncredited vocals on hit songs for years.

“I said to her, ‘Why hide behind something? You have a really great vocal. People are going to be shocked and pleasantly happy with what they’re going to hear. You are not one of these actresses who are trying to sing and not doing a good job of it.’”

Could it have been Brittany’s insecurities that prevented her album from being released? At least with new information being released we’re getting one step closer to hearing her music, especially with rumours swirling that music executives are looking into the matter.

Now all we need are Brittany’s high-profile collaborators like Chris Cox, Timbaland and Max Martin to get behind the project and we could finally have the long-awaited Brittany Murphy posthumous album.

It’s no secret that Kelly Clarkson is already working on her fifth studio album, so during a recent VIP pre-show concert on her current tour the singer-songwriter played a ton of new material for the lucky crowd.

Thank God for us that some sneaky snake managed to record all the songs and put them up on YouTube, giving us a look at what could potentially be several demos for her next album.

I wouldn’t treat these songs like the gospel though. Remember when four acoustic demos leaked for All I Ever Wanted, and only one of them “Ready” ended up making the album with the final version receiving a significant pop makeover?

There are way too many new songs for me to put up in this post, ranging from piano based ballads to country style hoe-down tracks, so I’ve only selected four of them to put here. If you want to hear the rest just click here.

My favorite is “Far From Home”, and if her next album sounds anything like it then it’s going to be f-cking amazing. Which is your favourite?

Between The Lines

Far From Home

I Wish I Could Be Lonely Instead

A Little More Time, A Little Less Over

Arguments over favourite artists usually stay between fans on various blogs and messageboards, but during a new interview with Harpers Bazarre Lily Allen decided to throw herself into the stan wars when asked who she preferred more out of Lady GaGa and Britney Spears.

“You can not compare Britney with Lady GaGa. Why? You are putting Lady Gaga at the same level of Britney Spears? I really cannot believe it.

“Lady GaGa is good, but she’s a new artist, Britney Spears is a legend.”

That’s the most sense that Lily has ever made in her whole career!

Paula Abdul broke chart records with her debut album Forever Your Girl, which sold over 12 million copies and spawned four #1 singles. Now look at her today, is she on the level of Janet, Madonna and Cher? No. What about 80′s teen queens Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, where are they now?

Hilary Duff was huge at one point, then as soon as she grew up Miley Cyrus came and took her spot.

This is nothing against GaGa but it takes a hell of a lot of work to reach not only the sales, but also the status and cultural relativity of Britney Spears. People always want something new and that’s why we have another it girl every few years, but it’s actually staying relevant that’s the real challenge. For all we know Ke$ha’s Animal could be a runaway success, and then the cycle will just start all over again.

Anyways so who do you prefer, Britney or GaGa?