5. Slayer "Christ Illusion" Debut: 62,449 Wow, makes you yearn for the days of yore, doesn’t it.  Pre-SoundScan.  When an act like this had NO CHANCE of making the Top Ten, not unless for some reason they suddenly caught fire with a radio track.  But that’s not gonna happen here.  Slayer’s hard core fans all […]

The era of big marketing is OVER! That was the mantra of the nineties, get the word OUT!  Let everybody know, AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN! This was radically different from the late sixties and early seventies.  When every record wasn’t expected to go platinum, back before there even WERE platinum records, back before the […]

XM has got baseball. Sirius has got Howard Stern. But if you think either of those can save their respective services, you’ve got no idea how much they’re PAYING for this programming. Furthermore, not everybody is a baseball fan, and hate to tell you, Howard Stern has got an aging audience. Which begs the question, […]

There’s a long article in today’s "Los Angeles Times" debating the merit of a music man or a suit running a record company.  Not really that interesting a question, but hell, it’s August and Ron Fair got a promotion and has some records to sell.  Oh, Jimmy Iovine weighs in.  And Andy Gould.  And even […]