Do you klnow who Crystal Kay is? She was pretty well known back then and she could only sell 396 copies of her last single.
If you don't have a good promotion machine behind you, you're likely to sell crap, and Maro even has to deal with the bad press, so... yeah.
Even if the song is bad, his voice isn't that unbearable. Reminds me of Miyavi's, tbh (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNQHbAYY6hQ).