Beyonce Shatters Twitter Record With Pregnancy Reveal; Album Sales Increase (729 hits)
By The Associated Press and LATimes.com
New York, NY (August 30, 2011) -- At the VMAs, Beyonce officially revealed a baby bump, cupping her growing belly for photographers as she arrived and rubbing her tummy when she performed. The 29-year-old singer is married to Jay-Z.
Her pregnant performance at the MTV Video Music Awards sparked a Twitter record. When she performed at 10:35 p.m. EDT Sunday night, there were 8,868 tweets per second. Twitter said that rate was a record for the service.
The mass amount of 140 character-long messages wasn't the only way the Grammy-winning artist took over Twitter: "BEYONCE IS PREGNANT" turned into a huge Trending Topic and many fans changed their Twitter profile pic to photos of the songstress.
Twitter's impressive stat comes as no surprise, since Sunday night's VMAs had the highest ratings for the award show ever. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to Nielson Co., the audience was up 9 percent compared to last year's VMAs: 12.4 million viewers tuned in, making it MTV's most-watched telecast ever.
After telling the audience that she wanted them "to feel the love that's growing inside," she dived into "Love on Top,” a cut from her album “4.”
The performance boosted the nonsingle into the iTunes top 5, while her actual single, “Best Thing I Never Had,” is currently languishing at No. 23. The album has also made its way back into the top 10 on iTunes, coincidentally landing at the No. 4 spot.
Despite being herald by critics, the disc has struggled a bit commercially.
The album's first two singles, “Best Thing I Never Had” and “Run the World (Girls),” have failed to take off like “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” “Irreplaceable,” “Crazy in Love” and other huge hits.
The album has so far logged fewer than 700,000 units, according to Nielsen Soundscan, since its June release -- a sluggish number when compared to the record-breaking tallies that Adele and Lady Gaga have enjoyed with their recent releases.
