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This week’s top ten is dominated by female artists - Rihanna, Gabriella Cilmi, Sara Barielles, Duffy and…Jordin Sparks?

Yeah, it seems like there’s still life in Miss Sparks’ career after all.

Better yet, we have the return of Ne-Yo and his more youthful counterpart, Chris Brown. Brown makes a double appearance in the top ten with Forever and duetting with Jordin Sparks on No Air.

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It’s always been a mystery why Amerie hasn’t been more successful. With tunes like One Thing, Gotta Work, and Take Control, she’s an R&B artist who should be swimming in record sales right now.

Good times might be on the horizon though - after splitting with her former label, Columbia, earlier in the year, Amerie has recently signed with Def Jam.

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Further proof (if you need it) of Natasha Bedingfield’s conquering of America comes in the news that she’s been chosen as the opening act for the New Kids On The Block reunion tour this autumn.

The tour will run for just over two months, beginning on 18 September and ending on 26 November.

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Can you feel the fervour building up around the new Metallica album? The band has just announced the title of its ninth studio album, Death Magnetic.

As you can see from the picture, the album cover is expected to be stark white with the album title and the ‘M’ from the Metallica logo forming a pattern around it. Does anyone else remember scrawling these letters on schoolbags and books?

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Big fat celebrity pundit Perez Hilton has been taking swipes at Lily Allen lately. However, he’s obviously picked on the wrong gal, as our Lily has a direct line to the public via her MySpace page.

Lily blogged today about being upset by Perez’s latest blog post in which he claims she’s fallen out of favour at Capitol Records, and alleges that she smoked during her pregnancy and that her miscarriage was suspicious.

While she admits that she’s been partying and working hard recently, Lily claims much of what Hilton has written is completely made up and hurtful. She even goes so far as to point out the hypocrisy of Perez running anti-bullying campaigns on his blog as he paints the words “Has Been” over the top of a picture of her:

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I’ve not bought an Alice Cooper album since Hey Stoopid, but the king of getting killed onstage is obviously still working in between rounds of golf, because Alice has a new album coming out in July!

Playing heavily to the old ’shock rock’ image, the track listing has a definite slant toward chilling titles. I remember back when Trash was released they talked about keeping the titles horror-related in line with Alice’s image, but making the content more contemporary.

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Idolator ran this little nugget today about an ongoing battle between the RIAA (boo) and the NAB (er…yay). Basically, the RIAA are trying to squeeze the radio broadcasters for more royalties for playing their records. And yes, the common sense response is “But doesn’t that airplay help promote the records? Isn’t that why music videos were referred to as ‘promos’?”

Well, yes dear reader, it does. And a little study by the NAB (OK, might be a tiny bit biased) suggests that basically the two industries need each other. The recording industry needs radio to beam their songs into the heads of the populace, the broadcasters need music to entertain their listeners with. Capiche?

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I got a shout earlier today from a musician called Bradley Boyer, the guy behind a brilliant band called Auto Defiance. I’d all but stopped writing about unsigned bands because of the pitiful quality of acts that emailed me, but Auto Defiance are worth writing about!

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It’s a known fact that rock bands love to cover Michael Jackson songs, which is why we’re not surprised to learn the mascara-loving members of Fall Out Boy are covering Jackson’s classic, Beat It.

On this track, they’ve teamed up with celebrity boyfriend-for-hire/guitarist John Mayer (come on, you’ve never heard his music either, have you?) for quite a stormin’ rendition of an awesome song.

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So, Gabriella Cilmi is the latest in a long line of female artists seemingly exploiting the old jazz/blues/soul genres. Sweet About Me is reminiscent of Norah Jones and Katie Melua at their absolute best, cool and subtly flirtatious (well, Melua in that respect).

PopJustice wittily remarked that Sweet About me could become #1 by Christmas, noting that the single has had a slow burn effect, gradually climbing into the top ten after initially entering the charts at a very low position.

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