In the natural order of things, the fourth quarter in the record business used to mean albums from superstar artists. The first quarter was for new acts. Even if you had an obvious hit in your quiver—e.g., a song that was already No. 1 around the world (say, “Wannabe” or “I’ve Been Thinking About You”) you waited to impact it in the first or second week of January. Otherwise, a new artist was just going to get drowned out by all those super heavies.

In 2011, however, there is a perception, at least, that Q4 hasn’t been as heavy as usual. “Where are all the major fourth quarter releases? Just a bunch of average stuff out there,” one large-market Top 40 PD wrote. He characterized the current product as “sixth and seventh singles. No major artist is working anything huge. Seems odd, right?” And it wasn’t the first time I’d had the conversation. Then there is the recent success of Outasight’s “Tonight Is The Night.” Even without a Pepsi ad, it would have sounded like an undeniable hit. But in years past, it would have been timed for Jan. 6.

But there is big name product. As I survey the charts, the top three albums in the country last week were the new Coldplay, the new Kelly Clarkson, and the new Michael Bublé holiday album. There’s a Bruno Mars hit and a forthcoming Drake album. There was the Maroon 5/Christina Aguilera duet that carried us through most of the summer. And, of course, there’s a forthcoming Rihanna album.

Rihanna’s “We Found Love” was rushed out on top of a still-growing single from the artist’s previous project, for the seeming purpose of Q4 timing alone. And any skepticism about that song—and I did hear a little at first—has long been drowned out by the vroop-vroop-vroop of the song’s techno powerchords. Rihanna’s annus horribilis in 2009 claimed her usual spot as the Queen of Summer Hits. Ultimately, though, it gave her something better—a regular fourth-quarter spot. And perhaps as a result, there’s much less murmuring about her as the artist who gets airplay but doesn’t sell albums.

So why wouldn’t Q4 feel heavier to people? Some of it is the ever-widening gap between “superstar product” and “what CHR thinks it can play.”

Not all the Q4 superstars are CHR automatics. There is, as it happens, no shortage of Q4 artists who are familiar brand names with a built-in consumer following and a history of selling albums over multiple projects—Coldplay, Clarkson, Daughtry, Nickelback, Drake. There are also a lot of Q4 artists who are consistent hitmakers at today’s 120 b.p.m. Mainstream CHR format. But if you’re not both, does that mean you’re not a superstar?

Few could deny Coldplay their superstardom, but that doesn’t mean Mainstream CHR isn’t ambivalent about them—having resisted both the first single because it didn’t sound like Coldplay and the second single because it did. (Good thing there’s a Rihanna duet on the album.) Conversely, some industry people would be stingy about describing David Guetta that way, but prominent DJs sell out arenas these days even when they don’t have top 5 singles.

Not all the Q4 superstars are pop artists at all. Retailers are probably very excited about the new Miranda Lambert album and the new Toby Keith (powered by a recent Country No. 1 and another fast-breaking reaction record). And no Top 40 PD has to be excited about them for consumers to care.

Not all the Q4 superstars are releasing contemporary albums. Two decades ago, the music industry learned that a holiday album was a good way to sell albums even if an artist was no longer of interest to radio. Then the music industry learned that even an artist who might still get airplay could sell more albums during Q4 with a concept record. So while Michael Bublé and Justin Bieber would hardly be guaranteed a CHR hit, they’ve widened the gap by releasing albums that will sell without CHR.

You can add the following factors:

The industry stopped pinning all its hopes on Q4. The annual competition for “The Single of Summer” means that superstar hits are as likely geared to Memorial Day as Labor Day, now. And that a superstar act is likely to be on a second or third single from an album by the time Black Friday rolls around. And if that first single wasn’t the hit of the summer, the second or third single feels somehow diminished.

Labels, having had an existential crisis, now feel free to run barefoot on the beach, unencumbered by the things they once thought important. The difficulty of selling albums in their previous quantities has, perhaps, made the traditional Q4 game plan seem a little less important. So why limit yourself to a September single and a November album? Release the hits when you’ve got ’em. Psychologically, an overabundance of big names in Q4 is nice, but so is a steady supply of hits. Most Top 40 PDs are probably very glad that Maroon 5 didn’t save “Moves Like Jagger” and “Stereo Hearts” for a fourth album next year, as was once considered.

Radio stopped treating superstar albums like superstar albums. PDs no longer bum rush an album by a name artist looking for the next singles like they used to. (You can be sure that if “Moves Like Jagger” and “Stereo Hearts” had been released simultaneously on a Maroon 5 album, CHR PDs would not have played them at the same time.) Labels, of course, rarely encourage PDs to interfere with their marketing plans for successive singles, but it does deny projects a certain amount of validation when PDs no longer even try.

Adele keeps selling. She yielded the top album slot to new releases last week. But “21” will probably be up there again at some point. That doesn’t mean that the Q4 releases aren’t exciting. It just means that her hit album is doing what hit albums are supposed to do—sell all year long. In Q4 of 1983, when there was an abundance of great product, having “Thriller” keep going after nearly a year only heightened the excitement.

Finally, the fault is not in our superstars, but in ourselves. The discussion about Q4 superstars isn’t really a referendum on the actual artists releasing albums. It’s actually about the overall state of Top 40 music. CHR’s dominant “Turbo-Pop” sound has lost its “shock-of-the-new.” It still produces hits, but many of them are the nth iterations of the genre—not Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, but O-Town. And there aren’t a lot of cool, uptempo records that come from somewhere else. (Foster The People is an exception.) And while Adele’s hits are clearly reactive, another six ballads that sound like “Someone Like You” will be reactionary on Top 40’s part.

So how are you feeling about fourth-quarter product? Please leave a comment.