With today’s typical popular

This site looks just like Britney though – artificially glossy, unashamedly commercial and too good to be true. A simple page set up by tomorrow’s one-hit-wonder. Originality and creativity are as lacking here as on her latest album (unimaginatively titled “Britney.”) The home page unashamedly flashes three ways to buy the product – the tour, the movie and the album. It’s bright orange and jammed full of icons that dance when you approach. Alluring photos of the pop babe wink at you from all angles. Even more show-biz than rock-and-roll.

It’s a long site too, scroll down off the page and it keeps on going down and down. This might be a big plus to male fans examining the full-length poster images under the Images section, but makes the presentation rather sprawling and over-facing. Speaking of the Images section, the photos are over a year old. Has Britney aged too much to run current pictures?

The feeling that this is a synthetic brand, constructed around a real person but over-packaged to the point of being sickly, is strongest in the press releases area of the site. Nothing here that doesn’t complement the core brand values of virginal sweetness. Despite the hundreds of press articles printed all over the world about every move Britney makes, we are only served up tame accounts of her charity work, (MathNMusic and a camp for Performing Arts), promoting literacy and cheering up troops overseas.

There is loads of stuff for the real fans, including free downloads, pictures, tour dates and snippets of “news” about their favorite singer. There is also a Game, which allows you to pretend to be one of Britney’s dancers. There are 12 levels with passes awarded that entitle you to see never-before-viewed video clips and footage of Britney. What there isn’t, is character. This is a record company packaging-job with little to reflect the artist’s true personality, beyond her looks and the doll-like image her management creates.

Most disappointing of all, this site is absolutely silent. Britney’s voice, so often secondary to the over-engineered backing tracks on her albums, is nowhere to be heard. Her recorded music is lost behind the image and this site buries it too. Perhaps fans hitting the site can’t be trusted not to copy her tunes?