As sales of his latest album, Graffiti, continue to falter, Chris Brown issued a message to his fans this week to help revive his music career in the wake of his
guilty plea to felony assault on former girlfriend Rihanna last year.
Posting on the Web site SayNow.com — a site that enables people to leave and share recorded messages — Brown apparently said American radio stations are not playing his songs, which has made promoting Graffiti difficult for him. In an earlier message, Brown urged fans to keep in touch with him by calling a special 877 number while he is on tour.
At press time, a spokesperson for Brown had not responded to MTV News' requests for comment on the message, nor confirmed that the messages are definitely from him.
In a new missive uploaded on Wednesday morning, he directly asks fans to lend him a hand. "Hey, what's up, y'all? CB. I ain't never really did this but right now I'm just calling ya'll, I need all of my fans' help," he said in the 90-second clip. "I need all the fans that I have, I need y'all's help. It's crazy because a lot of radio stations ... some radio stations aren't playing my records. They're not being that supportive and I wouldn't expect them to.
"It's on the fans and what you guys do [whatever is] in y'all power to bring me back because that's all I need, is you guys," Brown continued. "Nothing else will do that except for the fans. There's nothing else that I can do. I'm doing everything that I need to do. I'm doing me as a person and I'm a better guy. But it's on y'all.
"My singing and my music is all great, but I do it for you guys and everything else but it won't be possible if I'm not relevant on the radio and it won't be possible for me to be an artist if I don't have any support from people that give me an artists outlet. I can't be an underground mixtape artist!" Brown said with a laugh. "I just want all my fans to help me. I love y'all. Peace."
Since its release in early December, Graffiti has spawned the singles "I Can Transform Ya," "Crawl" and "Sing Like Me," with only "Transform Ya" gaining traction on radio and the album's sales stalling out at just over 250,000 copies. The singer mounted a small "Fan Appreciation" tour from October through December that hit modest theaters that were considerably smaller than the arenas he played with Bow Wow on the tour for his previous album, 2007's Exclusive, which has sold nearly 2 million copies to date.
When contacted back in November, a number of radio programmers told MTV News they weren't shying away from playing Brown's songs on the radio in light of the sordid details of the assault that leaked prior to Brown's guilty plea.
And though fans appeared to like "Transform Ya," many programmers appear to have cooled on the singer's music for now. At the moment, Brown does not have any songs in the top 50 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop chart.
This report is from MTV News.
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