Back in 2001, a five-piece pop group shot to the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 almost overnight, toured with some of the biggest names in music, and then quietly disappeared before most fans even learned all their names. The group was Eden’s Crush, born out of a reality show experiment that predated American Idol, and for a brief window they looked like the next big thing in pop.
Then, just as fast as they arrived, they were gone. What happened to Eden’s Crush is a story about timing, a record label collapse, and one member who went on to become far more famous than the group that launched her.
A reality show built to manufacture a pop act
Eden’s Crush was an American girl group created on the television series Popstars, which aired on the now defunct WB, formed in late 2000. The show was not subtle about its intentions. Hundreds of girls competed to become pop stars in late 2000 on the TV series Popstars, produced by David Foster.
From that pool, the group was narrowed down to five finalists, Ivette Sosa, Maile Misajon, Ana Maria Lombo, Nicole Scherzinger and Rosanna Tavarez, over several prime time episodes. What made the deal unusual was the confidence behind it. Warner Bros./Sire Records signed the group to a recording contract before the band was named or had finalized its membership, due to the hours of network television exposure the group would receive.
Get Over Yourself and a fast climb up the charts
The group’s music arrived almost immediately after the show ended, and it worked. The group’s debut single, “Get Over Yourself,” topped the Canadian Singles Chart and peaked at number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. For a brand new act with zero prior fanbase, that was a genuinely strong debut.
The single also carried real commercial weight beyond chart position. The single was certified gold by the RIAA, denoting 500,000 units sold in the United States. A follow-up single tried to keep the momentum going, though with less impact. A second single, “Love This Way,” was released promotionally in July 2001 but underperformed compared to the debut.
The album that never got a real second act
The full-length project came together under significant time pressure. The album received only moderate promotion due to financial restraint, and had to be recorded quickly in order to fit into the timing of the television show. Despite that rushed process, the results were commercially respectable.
Popstars, released in the United States by London-Sire Records and 143 Records on May 1, 2001, debuted at number six on the US Billboard 200 selling 99,000 copies. It went on to become a legitimate hit by any reasonable measure. Their album Popstars was certified gold, and peaked at number 6 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
Sharing stages with bigger names
For a group that existed for barely two years, Eden’s Crush managed to land some notable exposure. In 2001, they played as a support act on some dates for *NSYNC’s Pop Odyssey Tour and Jessica Simpson’s DreamChaser Tour. That kind of placement usually signals a label betting on long-term growth.
Television appearances rounded out their brief run in the spotlight. In 2001, the group guest starred as themselves on the season 5 episode 22 of the television show Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. It was the kind of visibility most new acts would kill for, which makes the group’s sudden end feel even stranger in hindsight.
The label collapse that ended everything
The story of Eden’s Crush is less about creative failure and more about corporate timing. The group disbanded in early 2002, after AOL Time Warner shuttered London-Sire Records. That single business decision essentially erased any path forward for a second album.
Without a label, there was no marketing budget, no distribution, and no reason for the group to continue as a unit. Shortly after finding moderate success with their single, “Get Over Yourself,” the group’s record label, London-Sire, went out of business. A gold album and a top ten single simply were not enough to survive a label folding underneath them.
Nicole Scherzinger’s leap to The Pussycat Dolls
Of the five members, one name became a household one for an entirely different group. Nicole Scherzinger went on to join The Pussycat Dolls. That group became one of the defining pop acts of the mid 2000s, a sharp contrast to the quiet end of her first project.
Her career kept expanding well beyond music. Scherzinger went on to become the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, who eventually broke up in 2010, after which she branched out as a solo artist, appeared as a judge on shows like The X Factor and The Masked Singer, and starred in the West End’s 2014 revival of Cats, earning her a Laurence Olivier Award nomination. It is a career arc few former reality show contestants ever come close to matching.
Ana Maria Lombo’s reinvention as a jazz age performer
Away from mainstream pop, Ana Maria Lombo carved out a niche career that has little in common with the bubblegum sound of Eden’s Crush. Since leaving Eden’s Crush, Ana Maria Lombo has continued working as a musician, now under the persona Annie Trousseau. Her current act draws heavily on vintage influences rather than chasing radio trends.
Describing her own work, she has framed it as something closer to a musical experience than a straightforward performance. She has described herself as “a recording artist, a bandleader, performer, multilingual chanteuse, and a curator of musical experiences,” noting her “unique repertoire comes mostly from the 20s-60s.” She also picked up occasional acting work along the way, including a role in a major war film years later.
Rosanna Tavarez, Ivette Sosa, and Maile Misajon after the breakup
The remaining three members moved into fields adjacent to entertainment rather than chasing another music deal. Rosanna Tavarez pivoted toward television hosting before settling into a different profession entirely. According to her website, she worked as a television host for Fox, E!, TV Guide, and Telemundo, and is a certified dance teacher at CalArts Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance.
Ivette Sosa briefly tried acting before also landing in dance instruction. Following the group’s disbandment in 2002, Sosa briefly pursued acting, appearing in the Disney Channel series Even Stevens and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, as well as the 2003 film Chasing Papi and the 2005 Broadway production Latinologues. Maile Misajon took the most dramatic geographic detour of the group, leaving Los Angeles altogether for a quieter life in Tennessee where she raises her family and writes music on the side, according to her own account for a Nashville lifestyle blog.
Why a manufactured group from a forgotten show still matters
Eden’s Crush is often described today as a footnote, but it was actually a genuine milestone in how the music industry built pop acts. Eden’s Crush played a pivotal role in the early 2000s reality TV boom by emerging as the first major success from an American music competition series, influencing subsequent programs like American Idol and The X Factor that popularized the manufactured group concept on a global scale. That influence rarely gets credited to the group itself.
Interest in the story has not fully faded either, especially among younger listeners discovering the era secondhand. In the 2020s, Eden’s Crush has been revisited in retrospective content focusing on early-2000s pop phenomena, including a 2024 YouTube documentary segment in the series Forgotten Girl Groups of the 90s & 2000s, which explores their brief rise and disbandment. It is a small but steady reminder that the group’s fifteen minutes left more of a mark than most people assume.
A one album run that still gets rediscovered
What sets Eden’s Crush apart from countless other short lived pop acts is how cleanly their story fits into a single narrative arc: a reality show, one hit single, one gold album, and a label that collapsed at the worst possible moment. The show brought five young women together to form the group, only one of which, Nicole Scherzinger, most people likely still recognize today. That imbalance between one member’s ongoing fame and the others’ quieter paths is a big part of why the group keeps resurfacing in “whatever happened to” pieces.
There was no messy public breakup, no scandal, and no falling out that made headlines. The group simply ran out of corporate runway before they had the chance to release a second record. Twenty five years later, Popstars remains their only studio album, a modest but real commercial success frozen in place by circumstances that had nothing to do with the music itself.
