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Just found this interesting section about Carly Hennessy in a 2006 Guardian article. Carly reappeared with the surname Smithson in American Idol in 2007 and is now in a band with Ben Moody from Evanescence.

“Only about one-fifth of artists end up making money for the label, and a few make so much that they subsidise everyone else, but you can’t tell in advance which ones will do well. This explains why the success rate is only one-fifth. It also explains Carly Hennessy.

Ever since she was a small child, people had been telling Carly that she had a beautiful singing voice. By the time she was 10, she had had a hit in her native Ireland with Carly’s Christmas Album, and toured Europe as part of the cast of Les Misérables. By the time she was 18, she was living in Los Angeles, with a six-album contract and an expensive apartment provided by the record label MCA, which was desperate to match the success that Sony was enjoying with Britney Spears.

Hennessy received an advance of $100,000, and the buzz on the west coast was that her first album, Ultimate High, would be MCA’s answer to Britney’s debut, Baby One More Time. Of course, successfully emulating the title song of Spears’ album would depend on figuring out what it was about that song that makes it so catchy. Is it the chord sequence (one of the simplest imaginable - four main chords cycling through the whole piece)? The lyrics (with their weirdly troubling undertones of violence, though the label’s claim at the time was that “hit me” meant “call my pager”)? Or the driving, martial beat, which is probably the song’s most distinctive element?

Things soon started going wrong. Executives at the label thought Hennessy’s voice sounded “too Barbra Streisand”, and the album, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, had to be re-recorded from scratch. Some tracks were recorded in the early hours of the morning, because Hennessy’s voice was raspier then. It was a very expensive process. By the time Ultimate High was released in spring 2001, MCA had spent $2.2m to make it and promote it vigorously across America.

In its first three months, it sold 378 copies. It recouped less than $5,000. Carly Hennessy has not released an album since.”

Carly then and now:

Maybe the album would have sold more copies if it didn’t look like she had no arm?