Billboard has willingly made itself entirely irrelevant
December 17th, 2009 • chatter
I’m going to choose to use the National Post’s exact headline runner for this, because of the sheer absurdity:
Nickelback: ‘Band of the decade’, according to Billboard
Yes, they deemed Nickelback as the band of the decade based on one analysis point alone: sales. And they somewhere throw in and derive “importance”. Who are they important to besides their record company? I have exactly one friend that actually likes Nickelback, basically on the same premise why everyone else dislikes them: they suck. I don’t know about you but I’ve found their last 5 or 6 singles to sound exactly the same — musically, they are — and that’s what is making them money. I’m glad they found a formula to keep the cash rolling in and they have no need to innovate or progress in their music. Frankly, take their first album and compare it to their latest album, you’ll hear that it’s basically the same album, rearranged differently and with different lyrics. Instead of writing songs that might be insightful to someone at some point, they’ve simply delved into writing radio songs about sex. Only sex.
I love this quote from the NP article:
“We’ve just accepted that we’re never going to be the critics’ darlings, and we’re OK with that,” frontman Chad Kroeger told Billboard in 2007.
He’s OK with it because his label is shipping them off for tours around the world and bankrolling them. The subtext of this is pretty simple: they’re completely content with being lowballed by critics and other reviewers (who help to get their music sold) because they’re making money. Truck loads of it. Kroeger knows economics well.
I find the comments equally funny because it shows just how many people, myself duly included, despise such a terrible band. However, I find it even more sad that Billboard would actually come out and say this even though I understand completely what their own metrics models are based on: sales. Although, Billboard is also used to trend popularity and where the market is going, musically. They have a hue bevy of data at their disposal about this stuff and they chose to home in on a single vector. Why? I have no idea, but I’m sure it was done in good intentions although, they did not think about what they were doing to their own reputation in the process.