Sold 517,000 albums last week.  The third highest debut this year, after Lil’ Wayne’s "Tha Carter III" with 1,006,000 and Coldplay’s "Viva La Vida" with 721,000.

That’s piss poor.

‘N Sync sold 1.1 million albums IN ONE DAY!  By time a week had passed, "No Strings Attached" had sold 2.4 million copies!  Are the Jonas Brothers that much worse than ‘N Sync?  No, times have changed.

When "No Strings Attached" was released in 2000, Napster was available, but few individuals other than college students had high speed connections.  But, more importantly, MTV still ruled.

Do we blame MTV for playing no videos?  Do we applaud Justin Timberlake for biting the hand that fed him at the last VMAs?  That would be a waste of time.  Because it’s not like videos are completely unavailable on television, there are numerous channels, even programmed by MTV itself, higher on your cable dial that are essentially wall to wall videos, but no one wants to watch them, at least not in prodigious numbers.  If you’re interested in watching a video, you go to the Web, see what you want, on demand, instantly.  The days of sitting in front of the box for hours, waiting for your favorite video to appear, are done.  The collective consciousness built around MTV is history.

The major labels keep beating the piracy drum.  And I won’t say P2P and other private transfers are insignificant, but more important is the change in our society, its decentralization, people scattering into niches.

You used to have no choice.  You listened to what radio and MTV fed you.  Now, youngsters hate radio and are tuning out in droves, if they ever tuned in to begin with.  The history of music is available at your fingertips, you can go exactly where you want to and leave the rest behind.

The mainstream press has not caught up on this, because it’s based on the old broadcasting model.  Lasso the most people and dictate.  But does YouTube dictate?  eBay?  They’re just aggregators, in total they’ve got more users than the old mainstream dictation media outlets do, it’s just that everybody’s involved with completely different media.  And, if something garners a lot of eyeballs, it’s usually a train-wreck, some inane video about saving Britney or two cups that gets a momentary spike and is then forgotten.

So, if you light yourself on fire, people will pay attention for maybe a day.  But then it becomes, what have you done for me lately?

Which is why the publicity stunts no longer work.  They’re seen as such.  And the more you parade yourself in the mainstream press, the higher the risk you turn people off.  If Coldplay entered the market today, they’d be a fraction of the size they are, and people wouldn’t hate Chris Martin.  It’s just that Coldplay was one of the last bands to eke through under the old dictation system, we were all paying attention then, we’re not anymore.

What are the new acts that have broken?  All we read about are the old acts, with critical mass, charging a fortune, going on the road.  And the only oldsters who could sell records, the Eagles, released an album that almost no one has heard.  They may have been paid by Wal-Mart, but it’s almost like the album didn’t come out.  Most people have never heard "Long Road Out Of Eden", whereas back in ’77, if you hadn’t heard "Hotel California", you didn’t have ears.

This has got nothing to do with quality.  It’s got to do with options.

As for the Jonas Brothers…  They even had their own damn movie on Disney, "Camp Rock"!  This is even better than what ‘N Sync was the beneficiary of way back when.  But as strong as the Disney brand is, it’s not that strong.  It’s not Big Brother.  It can make hits, but not everything featured evolves into a ubiquitous phenomenon.  How many kids are surfing the Net instead of watching what’s fed to them hour by hour on Disney?  How many kids are listening to oldies or something else?

Lil’ Wayne…  Have you heard "Tha Carter"?  Not unless you’re interested.  You have to seek it out.

I live in a Rihanna free zone.  It’s not 1964, I’m not subjected to her latest track next to the work of the British Invasion.  Hell, if it were 1964 today, Beatlemania would be a sideshow.  Pointing out that even if you’re GREAT today, your traction is going to be limited.

I actually think the Jonas Brothers are a step up from Miley Cyrus and a lot of the recent pre-teen dreck.  They can play and they can write.  But obviously, kids are more interested in their own camp experience than the faux one portrayed on the Disney Channel.  You might say that they have a short attention span, but that is wrong.  They graze until they find what they’re truly interested in, then dig extremely deep.  Guitar Hero is better than the Jonas Brothers, they’d rather play the former.  You don’t have to consume what the man feeds you any longer.  This is the story of the twenty first century, not piracy.