Gordon in the morning: Limited release leads to limited sales shock

Gordon has some fun poking Nadine Coyle with a stick this morning:

NADINE COYLE has sold an embarrassing 117 copies of her debut solo single.

117 is quite disappointing. Although a couple of paragraphs later, Gordon admits that she hasn't actually sold 117 copies at all:

The singer, who released Insatiable exclusively through the supermarket, flogged 117 copies, according to official first-day sales figures on Monday. Digital sales were dire too - just 2,439.

So, "sold 117 copes of her single" if you ignore all of Tuesday's sales and all the download sales. And you can only buy the physical record in one place - a store which tends to do most of its business at the other end of the week. And you can't find the mp3 everywhere, either - Amazon don't have it, for instance.

So, in that context, perhaps not such a terrible result.

CHERYL COLE's sales figures rub further salt into Nadine's wounds.

The X Factor judge has shifted 566 hard copies of track Promise This and 27,643 on t'internet - in her second week of sales. And she sold a whopping 157,000 copies in the first week.

T'internet? You're still doing that, Gordon?

Given that Cole is everywhere - both metaphorically and in terms of stockists - and it's only the second week of sales, I'd say those figures are probably more worrying for Cole than Coyle.

RIHANNA racked up 47,000 downloads with new song Only Girl (In the World).

That doesn't really sound like many. Sure, Nadine's not shifted much, but isn't the story here that all the sales figures are pretty grim here?

Smart pegs Coyle at 35 in the midweek charts - which is more interesting in its own right. If you're down to about 3,000 sales before you get out of the Top 40, how many singles do you have to sell to make the top 100? I feel as if I should be turning up there. I've not sold any singles at all, but it looks like that should guarantee an entry in the low 80s.

But Gordon's story isn't about the state of the music industry; it's all about kicking the heck out of Nadine Coyle:

At this rate she'll be in the reduced aisle with stale muffins by Thursday.

There's no mistaking Nadine's got a good set of pipes, but she's about as endearing as malaria.

Maybe if she'd put some work in over here instead of keeping her head down in LA, it would have fared better.

Most people who Gordon write about go to California, and they're living it large, Hollywood-style. Nadine Coyle goes there, and she's sneaking away in some posh foreign hidey-hole.

Her increasing rift with popular bandmates SARAH HARDING, NICOLA ROBERTS, KIMBERLEY WALSH and Cheryl can't have helped either.

She's in a rift with the popular ones.

Popular with The Sun, clearly.

Smart's bullying looks like a desperate attempt to keep in with Girls Aloud and The X Factor mothership.

It also makes you warm more and more to Nadine Coyle.