A decent article from Wired called "The Rise and Fall of the Hit" (although you can just read pages 1 and 3, and skip the history lesson on page 2)

The article points out that the last Mega Hit Album was NSync's No Strings Attached, which was also noted as the fastest-selling album of all time. That was back in 2000.

With the explosive growth of the internet and the accessability of music that comes with it, one would expect the previous milestones to be shattered at an exponential rate, but instead we have the opposite. Since 2000, music sales have declined, radio listenership is down, and music stores sales are floundering. Even the popularity of iTunes and Amazon are not enough to propel any singles or bands to Mega-Status.

Why not? Why hasn't there been any kind of SuperMegaBand or SuperMegaAlbum in the music industry since 2000? Where are the bands to replace U2 and Aerosmith? Where are the albums to replace 'Jagged Little Pill' and 'Appetite for Destruction'? The White Stripes had a good run, and became the poster children for the 'indie' genre invasion, but the closest thing we have to U2 now is Green Day.

Green Day is the new U2. Wow.

And the best we can do for the cover of Rolling Stone are the Red Hot Chili Peppers? It doesn't simply make my soul cry, it makes my soul swallow rusty razor blades until it dies of internal hemmoraging.

What could have caused this? Perhaps aging baby boomers and Gen-X-ers now have better things to waste their money on. Perhaps the RIAA scared people away with their paranoid cries of piracy, and thier the poisonous, evil hackjob at copyright management known as DRM. Perhaps there simply haven't been any albums or bands of Super-Mega-Calibre in the past six years?

That is a saddening thought. I have a happier idea.

What if instead of people spending their money on what the Industry tells them to, people actually are spending it on what They want? What if right now, more money than ever is being spent on music, but that money is going to the artists instead of the Record Company? Because if everyone paid money directly to the artist for the art they liked, Soundscan wouldn't track it, and Billboard and Spin wouldn't know it. This would explain the current situation.

Perhaps what I have been hoping for all this time is finally beginning to happen: the Industry is beginning to fail, and people are bypassing the middleman and going right to the artist. That is the way it should be, and to hell with 'The Hit', and Good Riddance. Spread the money out among all the artists instead of giving it all to the U2's of the world.

Or, maybe it's just my little fantasy, and everyone is really downloading their music on BitTorrent.

Whatever the real reason for the lack of Mega Hits and Artists, the Movie Industry needs to pay close attention, because the trends in video tend to follow the trends in audio by about five years....

Blog on,
-CZ

Labels: music, Music Industry