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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Billboard magazine

  • Billboard Presents The Top Music Moments of the Decade

    In my haste to start covering year-end Soundscan stuff, I didn’t realize that there were actually 53 weeks in this chart year!! So we’ll take a look at some of those year end numbers NEXT week. This, of course, also means that Susan Boyle still has a chance to overtake Taylor Swift for the honor of having the year’s best selling album, although I would say that chance is rather slim, considering both the fact that sales are going to drop sharply in the coming week as well as the fact that the kids who will be cashing in gift cards and exchanging their uncool Christmas gifts will be more apt to pick up Taylor Swift and RETURN copies of the Susan Boyle album.

    Anyhoo, while we’re waiting for the year-end charts to be tabulated, let’s take a look at Billboard’s list of the Top 50 Music Moments of the past decade. This list is a pretty accurate compilation of the past ten years’ most earthshaking popular music moments. From ‘Nsync and Eminem’s massive sales at the decade’s outset to the popularity of the iPod, the device that changed the way we listen to music forever, a lot has happened, good and bad, in music.

    That said, some of the moments listed here made me raise my eyebrow. Was the Spice Girls’ reunion tour important to ANYONE? Did Noreaga’s “Oye Mi Canto” really kick off the reggaeton movement (and which was a bigger flash in the pan, reggaeton or Texas rap?)? Couldn’t they have used a more sensitive headline to describe Elliott Smith’s death? If Kanye West was unknown outside of hip-hop circles when he had his little Hurricane Katrina telethon outburst, then who were the three million people who bought “The College Dropout” BEFORE that incident? Who edited and proofed this thing? It’s one thing to see numerous spelling and grammatical errors in a blog like this (which is normally composed on the fly and has an audience of 30), but when Billboard magazine is making more spelling errors than me (and I assume they pay someone to ensure that those errors don’t happen), we definitely have a problem.

  • Billboard Magazine Lists The Best of 2009

    Now that we’re in the last week of December, we’re being surrounded with all of these Best of Year or Best of Decade wrapups and lists. We’ll be taking a look at some of those over the next two weeks, and I figured the logical place to start would be with the fine folks at Billboard magazine.

    So, what were people buying and listening to on the radio in 2009? Pretty much the same thing they’ve been listening to for most of the decade:dance-oriented pop/R&B with a little country thrown in. Taylor Swift ranked as the year’s top artist and had 2009’s top album with “Fearless”. That particular album is closing in on the 5 million mark in sales and has truly been a crossover sensation. The next few spots on the artist list are pure pop: Beyonce, Lady GaGa (the year’s top new artist), The Black Eyed Peas and Miley Cyrus. Rapper Kanye West breaks up the monotony by placing at #6-he is also the year’s top-ranked male artist. Rock music doesn’t get representation until you get to Nickelback at #9, and after Beyonce, the highest ranked R&B artist is Ne-Yo at #17.

    Beyonce also captures the #2 spot when it comes to the top album of the year, and she’s followed by Nickelback’s “Dark Horse” and a pair of soundtracks-“Twilight” and “Hannah Montana-The Movie”. These positions are based on chart rankings and not actual sales. Soundscan will publish it’s year end rankings…uh, when the year ends in a week and a half.

    Here’s a list of this year’s Top 20 artists and Top 20 albums, according to Billboard.

    Top Artists:

    1) Taylor Swift
    2) Beyonce
    3) Lady GaGa
    4) The Black Eyed Peas
    5) Miley Cyrus
    6) Kanye West
    7) Britney Spears
    8) T.I.
    9) Nickelback
    10) Pink
    11) Kings of Leon
    12) Katy Perry
    13) Flo Rida
    14) Kelly Clarkson
    15) Jason Mraz
    16) The Fray
    17) Ne Yo
    18) Lil Wayne
    19) Rascal Flatts
    20) Zac Brown Band

    …and here are the year’s Top 20 albums:

    1) “Fearless” Taylor Swift
    2) “I Am…Sasha Fierce” Beyonce
    3) “Dark Horse” Nickelback
    4) “Twilight Soundtrack” Various Artists
    5) “Hannah Montana: The Movie Soundtrack” Various Artists
    6) “Circus” Britney Spears
    7) “808s & Heartbreak” Kanye West
    8) “The Fame” Lady GaGa
    9) “Relapse” Eminem
    10) “The E.N.D.” The Black Eyed Peas
    11) “Only by the Night” Kings of Leon
    12) “The Blueprint 3” Jay-Z
    13) “David Cook” David Cook
    14) “The Foundation” Zac Brown Band
    15) “Now That’s What I Call Music 29” Various Artists
    16) “Funhouse” Pink
    17) “Intuition” Jamie Foxx
    18) “No Line on the Horizon” U2
    19) “Unstoppable” Rascal Flatts
    20) “A Different Me” Keyshia Cole

    Interesting personal factoid is that I own 12 of the Top 20 albums of the year, but I actually paid for only 7 of them (Kanye, Jay-Z, U2, Beyonce, Pink, Zac Brown and Kings of Leon).