If anyone in the music business was hoping that the one-two punch of a holiday weekend and big-name releases would magically convince people to pay for music one last time, they may want to pour themselves a stiff drink, or at least spike their morning latte:
Billboard is reporting that the No. 1 album, Kanye West's
808s & Heartbreak, sold 425,000-450,000 copies over the course of last week, while Guns N' Roses'
Chinese Democracy woefully underperformed, moving between 250,000 and 260,000 copies during its first week on Best Buy's shelves. And that's not all: Depending on who you ask, overall music sales were down anywhere between 10% and 30% when compared with last year's holiday weekend, although online numbers were OK. Meanwhile, a UK tabloid is claiming that bigwigs at Universal Music Group are blaming the soft landing of
Chinese Democracy squarely on Axl, because he didn't do enough press for the album. Even though it probably received more free press than any other record this year. Yeah, it couldn't be that people currently see Guns N' Roses as something of a novelty act, and that people who liked
Appetite probably aren't so into the new sound, and that even those people who wanted to give Axl a shot were a bit weirded out by the whole preserved-in-1999-amber feel of the final recorded product, could it?
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Idolator
As has been mentioned in several recent year-end wrapup posts, the merits of putting together arbitrary listings of the year's "best" musical phenomena are somewhat negligible beyond their ability to create some controversy among music nerd types. For me, the ideal when I'm filling out one of the ballots proffered to me is that someone out there might check out one of the albums listed that the world at large hasn't shared my particular enthusiasm for up to that point (The Myriad's You Can't Trust A Ladder, now in stores!). What I'm wondering is this: Has reading any of these lists actually inspired you to make a music purchase this year?
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Notes on the rider that accompanied Van Halen's most recent reunion tour: David Lee Roth's dressing room had to be full of sugar-free Red Bull, but rug-free (so he could practice martial arts pre-show); also, his boudoir "SHOULD BE AS FAR AWAY FROM" those belonging to the other three Van Halens, for unspecified (but endlessly speculatable!) reasons. Also, Eddie needed 
