Could Alternative’s Day Of Doom Be Creeping Closer And Closer?
An update on the year-end sales roundup we posted earlier: the release, complete with sliced-and-diced data, has been posted, and we were particularly intrigued by the breakdown of albums by genre. (Those numbers, by the way, are in millions.) We couldn’t help but notice that the oh-so-’90s pigeonhole “alternative” is still in there, even though it’s been rendered even more meaningless by the introduction of a new genre called “rock” (which, apparently, just hit big with the kids this year). Is it too much to hope that, next year, the a-word rides off into the sunset? Not to sound like a 1995 issue of The Baffler, but “alternative” is an musical description that’s in such disarray, we couldn’t even tell you what its top albums of 2006 might have been. But we know one thing: If one of the top five “alternative” bands of 2006 is Nickelback, it’s time to hand the genre’s sales-tracking slot over to anything else.
2006 U.S. Music Purchases Exceed 1 Billion Sales [BusinessWire] Earlier: Year-End Analysis, Continued: The Final Sales Tallies Are In
