As if Britney Spears doesn’t already have enough people out to get her, Billboard changed their paramaters about how to count album sales literally yesterday, resulting in Britney’s Blackout album officially getting knocked out of the #1 spot by The Eagles’ Long Road Out Of Eden. Geoff Mayfield, Billboard’s “Director of Charts” (aka President?), attempts to explain himself:

“We would have preferred to make this decision earlier, but only became aware within the last twenty-four hours that Wal-Mart would be willing to share the data for this title with Nielsen SoundScan.” The new rule, dubbed “The Screw Britney Clause” by industry insiders, denied Brit’s comeback album from the top spot it had earmarked for the entire week.

We’ve ripped on Britney an awful lot on this blog, but this whole situation has an extremely fishy “Jamaica getting kicked out of the Olympics in ‘Cool Runnings’” kind of feel to it. So to even the score, I will now spend a couple paragraphs ripping on The Eagles:

WHO THE F*CK WOULD WANT A NEW CD BY THE EAGLES??? I understand how Eagles Greatest Hits Volume 1 is such a high-selling cd, because of its crossover appeal and the always-prevalent lame adult-contemporary album purchasing sector of the public, but that is also the EXACT sector of the public that has no interest in ever seeking out new music, no matter who it’s by. My mother, for example, is a huge Bob Seger fan, and can listen to “Old Time Rock n’ Roll” for the millionth time and sing along to it, but if she hears a new Bob Seger song on the radio, she’s going to immediately hate it. Everyone possesses the instinct to use the bathroom when the ‘classic’ band plays their ‘new’ stuff in concert, even Eagles fans.

More importantly, if you can actually still listen to songs by The Eagles and derive genuine pleasure from them, you are by definition a human being who is incapable of getting tired of anything, ever. Logic therefore dictates that you would never, ever need new material by any band, correct? Has anyone ever said, “I’m a huge, huge fan of The Eagles, but I finally just got tired of ‘Take it Easy’ this year and would prefer to hear some new material’”?

Also, did I mention that the Eagles cd is available only at Wal-Mart? Who the hell do they think they are, the Sex Pistols??