I admit I'd forgotten that they were released on the same day - since Mofo didn't chart until 1998, I'd misremembered and thought it was released in early 1998.
Not persuaded it is an apples-vs-apples comparison though, since IGWSHA had the backing of appearing in a movie to boost its profile and was targeted at the general market and mainstream radio, while Mofo was more specifically focused at a club market, featuring solely remixes rather than the original album version or a radio edit. I don't think anybody should be surprised that with those two singles competing against each other, IGWSHA - complete with its fairly decent selection of b-sides - did better on the charts. That even appears to be the intention.
The City of Angels film didn't come out until April, 1998, four months after the IGWSHA single was released. So clearly the film would have had no impact on those chart numbers. And as you know, it was a different version. Want to try that again?
I don't by the remix/radio edit thing. Lots of singles are remixes and different from the album version. Interestingly, both Mofo and IGWSHA contained alternate versions of the other song as b-sides. If anything, that may have contributed to people not picking up both singles.
Hmmm. Perhaps however you're right about the marketing strategy, i.e. releasing both singles on the same day was two fold...one to appeal to a more mainstream audience, and one more to the dance crowd (which they were obviously trying to reach with this record). But in that case I don't think they were "competing" against each other.
In any event, we're losing sight of the original point. I'm not sure what's so difficult to admit...that IGWSHA was a better
single? Any casual listener, I believe would conclude that. It's clearly the more accessible song. Whether it's a better song in terms of quality is of course debatable, but I think at that point, as you said, they were at the end of Pop's run and not much they put out was going to light up the charts. In other words, it just really didn't matter. At that point, the public had already made their judgement on Pop (something that would be repeated again with NLOTH).