“Anti-Hero” is the official lead single from Swift’s 10 th studio album Midnights, which has been dominating the cultural conversation across generations since it arrived two Fridays ago. The guy who had briefly threatened to top the Beatles scored just two more Top 40 hits in 2008 and ’09 and then never cracked the Hot 100 again. Other than “Life,” Cook’s Idol coronation song, none of these were enduring hits-eight were off the chart the next week. For the week ending June 7, 2008, Cook blanketed the Hot 100, from “ The Time of My Life” at No. 3 to “ I’m Alive” at No. 99. So when Cook was announced as the Season 7 winner, the songs he’d been performing all season got a massive boost at iTunes-and for the first time, this data was shared with Billboard. Only the week the show ended could Apple share sales results for these Idol entrants. The TV producers didn’t want weekly sales totals to skew fans’ perceptions of the contenders’ chances, affect phone-in voting, or generally spoil the reality show’s final result. But there was a catch: Idol got Apple to agree not to release sales data on these songs, either on its own iTunes charts or to Billboard. For the first time that season, Idol contestants’ songs would be available for 99-cent purchase the same week they were performed on the show. It was the data, stupid: Before the ’08 season, the Idol producers signed a deal with Apple’s iTunes Music Store, the 800-pound gorilla of digital hitmaking in the years before Spotify. How did this grungy, goateed dude (David Cook was certainly a charmer but would not go down in history as the most celebrated Idol victor) rack up nearly a dozen Hot 100 hits in a single week, coming within spitting distance of an all-time Beatles record? But no previous Idol winner had generated that many Hot 100 hits-not even cumulatively. Since it launched in 2002, Idol had proven itself a juggernaut, minting pop stars including Kelly Clarkson, Fantasia, and Carrie Underwood. OK, sure, Cook was no ordinary ex-barkeep: He had just taken the crown in the seventh season of American Idol, the top-rated program on television. This instantly placed Cook second on the all-time list of most simultaneous chart entries in a single week-behind only the Beatles, who, one week in 1964, at the peak of Beatlemania, managed 14 simultaneous charting songs. In the spring of 2008, a former bartender from Missouri named David Cook, who had never appeared on the Hot 100 before, suddenly crash-landed with 11 chart debuts all at once. Before I dissect how this happened, gather ’round the campfire, kids, while I tell you a story from long, long ago, a time when this singer-songwriter had yet to score her first Top 10 pop hit. You may have heard that, this week, one artist-a notorious cat-lover with an increasingly foul mouth-has locked down the entire Top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100.
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