Well, it's taken week-after-week of decreasing sales, but Blackout has dipped out of Billboard's Top 50 albums. This gradual collapse of Blackout's sales is no surprise, but it's a real shame. Her finest work to date is being left completely out in the cold from every angle, and has been for weeks. We're in the midst of the ultimate lull in activity. Gimme More, after an excellent run worthy of celebrating, has peaked and already begun its tumble down the charts. Piece of Me has yet to see its release and subsequent push. Britney has been largely out of the picture, beyond the obligatory shots from paparazzi doing whatever it takes to shove a camera lens up her skirt. Things are quiet. Blackout has been left for dead...momentarily, at least.

There's little doubt that Blackout's 2nd most important week (after the debut week) will be the week of Piece of Me's biggest saturation...when the video is released, the single purchases start coming in, the radio spins increase, the buzz it will surely generate starts pulsating around the music world, etc. If Blackout can respond well to that, it'll show that this bad boy has enough legs to put forth a solid effort despite the very unconventional means with which it's being handled.

But if it whimpers through Piece of Me's biggest stretch, it'd just cement how unfortunate it is to know that the same person who unequivocally played the most significant role in this album's amazing quality in the recording process (the legendary Miss Britney Spears) is the same person whose circumstances likely play the biggest role in it not enjoying the commercial acclaim it so truly deserves.

Not to knock at all knock Britney, because a lot has to be said for the strenuous life-altering personal circumstances that have surely been the single catalyst for her choosing to stay out of the spotlight as of late...and the fact that she's been participating in music video shoots also shows that she's not 'turning her back' on Blackout, as some tabloid pundits have speculated through this extended lull in activity for Britney.

This is a situation people in-the-know, Jive and Sony BMG included, likely expected when they opted not to delay Blackout's release. Comments came from those camps during the release window and pre-release window acknowledging the aspects of Britney's personal life that would make this project challenging. But they made a business decision, one that I'm grateful for as a fan, to ride Gimme More's worldwide smash status with an October album release, rather than pushing it back until things had calmed down in Britney Land, as many expected. So I don't think Blackout being Britney's first studio record to start fizzling out so quickly would play a role in any label's future promotion of Britney Spears releases, because the environment surrounding Blackout is not one conductive to an album's commercial (mainly not having an artist available for any promotion beyond music videos, plus the unprecedented negative buzz that has yet to be completely flushed out), and it's not a situation representative of what a conventional Britney Spears release will face in the future.

The only real shame about Blackout's commercial performance thus-far is that if ever a Britney album deserved the recognition that commercial acclaim can garner, it's Blackout...and if ever a recording artist could have used that positive buzz to help reestablish their relevancy to the public-at-large, it's Britney Spears. All hope is not lost for Blackout, though. Piece of Me is on the horizon: the song is hot, the video has a well-established director (unlike Gimme More), and Britney is looking incredible. There's room for a major boost, and such a boost could spark future singles to continue the train of positivity for Blackout. But if things never really significantly pick up and the subsequent singles coast unnoticed through the sea of pop music in 2008, we should all shake our heads at what will have been a major lost opportunity for an amazing album.

Through it all, there's one factor to keep in mind: Britney Spears proved with Blackout, no matter if it would have ended up only selling 100,000 copies or if it ends up selling over a million copies, that she's still the same eternally-relevant force of a recording artist that she's always been. We'll always have an amazing album to remember this era by, and even though Britney's personal situation has hampered her ability to participate in this era after the recording studio, it proves to us that there's a hell of a lot left in Queen B. This is only the beginning for this 26-year-old phenom, and as entertainment history has proven time and time again, speed bumps as minor as Blackout's tumble won't derail a bona fide icon.

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