Lady Gaga's News

Lady Gaga, it seems, will chalk up her third No 1 album on Sunday. On the face of it, it's a triumph. But this may not be the continuation of an imperial phase and could be the start of a new period in the career of Stefani Germanotta.

The portents for Gaga's comeback have not been encouraging. Her last tour failed to sell out, advance reviews of her new album, Artpop, were decidedly mixed, and its first single dropped out of the chart almost as soon as it went in. On top of that, the singer had made dark comments about feeling "tormented" by the "corporate" music industry.

There have been rumblings, in the media and industry, for some time that Gaga, despite having sold 24m albums, might face a challenge to retain her level of success, and that some recent upsets could suggest that both she and the public had tired of the star known to her fans - the "Little Monsters" - as Mother Monster. Earlier this month she parted company with her influential manager, Troy Carter, with the inevitable "creative differences" being cited. Carter was said to have felt liberated by the break. Shortly before Artpop's release this week, the production duo Infected Mushroom, who contributed a song, revealed they felt "compromised" by the "cheesiness" of the result and asked for the band's name to be removed from the credits.

Gaga though is not like other pop stars and despite a shaky start - earlier this week, Artpop was outside's Amazon's top 20 sellers - the album is now heading for a No 1 debut in the official album chart on Sunday, which would make it the 999th No 1 album in the UK's chart history.

Not only that, "it will certainly be one of the top 10 fastest-selling albums of 2013 so far," said Dan Lane of the Official Charts Company. In its first three days, it sold 52,000 copies, pointing to a full-week sale of comfortably over 100,000. It's also on course to be No 1 in America, with 260,000 first-week sales predicted.

The figures may be a shadow of the opening week for her last album, 2011's Born This Way (which shifted 1.1m copies in its first seven days alone in the US), but album sales are down across the board. And Gaga has achieved her No 1 without a blockbuster single to pave the way - a considerable feat for a pop act.

"It's old-school showmanship," says Owen Myers of Dazed and Confused. "She still has the shock factor, and it's a shock factor that's not similar to Rihanna or Miley. She can still get people talking for a whole weekend based on [wearing] a crazy hat."

Yet showmanship is no longer the selling point it was. The general public is now inured to photographs of Gaga dressed as a brisket of beef, and she has further bewildered by announcing that Artpop has been heavily influenced by the performance artist Marina Abramovic and sculptor Jeff Koons. Where once she was mysterious and her music unavoidable, Gaga's mystique has evaporated while her music is rather more avoidable. As the US commentator Bob Lefsetz put it: "She can write, play and sing, but she became overwhelmed by her trappings." What's more, industry observers believe Artpop will only stay at the top for a single week, before being displaced by either Jake Bugg or Robbie Williams.

The pattern of a high chart entry followed by a noticeable dip is the fate of those artists known in the music industry as "fanbase acts" - those who generate massive loyalty among a significant hardcore, but without the ability to translate that into widespread iTunes downloads or supermarket sales. This may be the future for Gaga, with stadium gigs becoming a thing of the past.

However, she could thrive in this setting: Gaga's relationship with her Little Monsters has become a template that other pop acts have followed. Most major stars now give their following a name (such as Justin Bieber and his Beliebers), and encourage fans think of them as a friend and advocate. The loyalty thus generated was illustrated this week, on a BBC2 Culture Show special dedicated to Gaga. Interviewed outside the singer's London hotel, a female Little Monster said: "People are going to look back and realise how significant and important she was." There wasn't a hint of doubt in her voice.

Tina Hart of the industry magazine Music Week says the support of Gaga's fanbase has been crucial. "The Little Monsters mobilised when a rubbish-quality link to an unfinished version of [first single] Applause was leaked. There were so many reports to the Universal [her record label] take-down portal that the song was removed. That support had a spillover effect on album sales. But they were also helped by appearances on The X Factor and The Graham Norton Show.".

In fact, Gaga pulled off a strategic blinder on Norton. Instead of displaying the eccentricity that led The Culture Show to dub her "the world's most alternative mainstream artist", she joked with fellow guests actors June Brown and Jude Law as if she were just Stefani Germanotta from New York City.

"She gave a really good interview and performance," says Rob Copsey of the entertainment website Digital Spy. "It was completely the right balance. She can still connect." But, he concedes, she's in "a strange place" - torn between being Stefani from the block and the pop star who turns conventions about image upside down. "She's confused about what she wants to be: on the one hand, a Bowiesque eccentric and artist, but on the flipside she's barely wearing any clothes."