If record company hype and international success have anything to do with it, you will soon be hearing a lot from a young disco diva named Anastacia.

Although Anastacia Newkirk is from the United States originally -- born in Chicago, raised in New York -- she's become a huge superstar overseas without making a dent back home. The blend of dance grooves with R&B vocals on her 1999 debut album Not That Kind went multi-platinum in Europe, and her new CD Freak of Nature is already a big hit in a number of countries.

Anastacia was chosen Best New International Artist at the 2001 World Music Awards. She sings the official song of the 2002 World Cup, "Boom," and she'll perform it live at halftime of the final on June 30. She even has a number of online fan sites already, thanks to her European popularity.

Now Epic Records is trying to break Anastacia here in the United States with a massive media wave. The song "One Day in Your Life" is already a big dance club hit, and the record company hopes to have it all over radio and MTV soon. Meanwhile, Anastacia was on Regis and Kelly last Friday and will show up on The View and The Tonight Show in the next two weeks, before singing the national anthem at the baseball All-Star Game July 9. Basically, she'll be unavoidable.

So far, we haven't seen Anastacia searches move upward. But she already gets a fair amount of searches because of her overseas popularity. Last week Anastacia got more searches than a number of other popular music acts, including the rock bands Sum-41 and Puddle of Mudd and rapper Snoop Dogg. And yes, we've checked and those are not searches for the mysterious Russian princess Anastasia Romanov.

Combine international popularity with a domestic hype machine and what do you get? In recent months we've seen both Kylie Minogue and Shakira show up on the Lycos 50. Anastacia can shoot for the success of the first, and dream of the success of the second.

The new CD comes out in the U.S. tomorrow, and you can buy it through Lycos and CDNow. If you want to check out what Anastacia sounds like before buying, her first album is available for free streaming with our new Lycos Rhapsody service. Lycos Rhapsody streams CD-quality music from over 10,000 albums and is free through June 30.

TOMORROW: The new Lycos 50.