According to reports in the Evening Standard, Shayne Ward's brief stay in the business of music could soon be over, after label chiefs expressed their disappointment in only scoring a number 14 chart entry with new single 'Stand By Me', which was released last week.
One of those sources told the paper: "Given that reality TV winners stand or fall by their chart success, this is worrying for Shayne. It is a relatively quiet week for new releases and the top 10 is full of artists like Sandi Thom who have been there for ages. He should have gone into the top five at the very least. When you first come off the back of a reality show like X Factor you can't go wrong. No matter how good or bad your first single is, it will get to number one. But a few months on the momentum is gone and it all comes down to how good your song is. I think Shayne might have come down to earth with a bump."
Of course Ward still scored the highest new entry in the singles chart this week, and a hot week in July is never going to be the busiest in terms of record sales, and I get the impression the singles chart is slowly starting to show bias towards those artists that appeal to a download-savvy demographic (which Shayne does not). But then again, first week sales of the new single were 11,098, which is pretty poor when you consider that 742,180 copies of debut 'That's My Goal' were shifted in just four days, and the latest single release seems to have had little impact on all important album sales - so perhaps the doom mongerers are on to something.
Still, Shayne seemed upbeat when interviewed by ITV this week, saying: "Who knows what may actually happen in the future, but I'm doing great at the moment. I'm starting international now. I'm going to Australia, South Africa, the whole of Asia and I'm going to be performing. So at the moment, things are on their way up, so hopefully it lasts".
And if it doesn't, presumably there's some club that failed reality TV popstars get to join, where Gareth and Michelle and Steve and Noel and Danny and Suzanne and whatever the blokes in One True Voice were called all meet to throw darts at pictures of Simon Cowell and Girls Aloud whilst waiting for ITV to commission Return Of The Flop Idols which, after all, can only be a matter of time.