1. Jay-Z "Blueprint 3"

Sales this week: 475,670
Debut

That’s a fuck of a lot of records.

But still not as many as the boy bands sold at their peak almost a decade ago.

Sure, piracy is a factor, but it’s a fallacy to believe it’s the major factor.  When ‘N Sync was selling two million albums in a week, they were all over MTV and most homes did not have a high speed Internet connection.  Not only was it difficult to steal music, you also didn’t spend time updating your Facebook page, watching YouTube or viewing Hulu.  Now, you can go directly where you want online.  You can check out a zillion bands.  And when someone says to check out a new video, you think they’re Michael J. Fox, suddenly jetted into the future from the last century.

What changed in the music business was the loss of a center, the disappearance of the monoculture.  You just can’t get critical mass.

2. Miley Cyrus  "Time Of Our Lives EP"

Sales this week: 119,989
Weeks on: 3
Percentage change: -22
Cume: 335,473

It sucks growing up.  Just ask Shirley Temple.  You’re cute, you’re adored and then you sprout zits and want to date and you’re suddenly out of favor.  Furthermore, not having lived a real life, you have nothing to say.  So, your manufactured career starts taking a dive.

Have you been following the story of paperless ticketing on her tour?  Last time around, moms were bitching they couldn’t get a seat.  Now, seats have gone begging.  Proving that a lot of ticket hysteria is just that, no different from real estate or the stock market.  Speculators buy product hoping to pawn it off on someone else.  Then, suddenly, the market collapses.  Everybody’s a broker.  Add in the brokers themselves, and the pre-sales and the holdbacks, and it appeared that you just couldn’t get a ticket.  But it turns out you can.

Miley Cyrus was a guinea pig for Ticketmaster.  Her career has been hurt immeasurably.  But paperless ticketing is the future.  Nine Inch Nails literally put the name of every ticket holder for their Wiltern show on the ticket itself.  And IDs were checked on the way in.  Sold out instantly to the fan club, you could bring one friend, and everybody was happy.  Unless the fans can get good tickets at a fair price this business is screwed.  It’s about repeat business.  Career acts treating their customers well.

3. The Beatles "Abbey Road"

Sales this week: 88,736
Debut

If I could only buy one, this would not be it.  Love the second side suite, but it’s their darker, more exploratory stuff that truly resonates.  Then again, individual Beatle albums also hold down positions 5, 7, 8, 10, 16, 18, 19, 20, 24, 28, 31, 34 & 45.

We can bitch and say remastered CDs should have been released earlier.  Or that there should have been a Blu-Ray component.  And that the tracks should be available online.  All true, but missing the point.

This is the outlier story.  If you want to know why the Beatles are still selling, almost half a century on, read Malcolm Gladwell’s book.  The story of the band is one of the best parts of "Outliers".  But the bottom line is the band practiced.  Hard.  They got really fucking good.

And after reading "Outliers", be sure to pick up Daniel Coyle’s "Talent Code", which states that all practice is not alike.  Unless you’re challenging yourself, repeating difficult processes again and again, you will make little progress, you’ll never get to the destination.  In other words, you can ski every day on the greens, the baby slopes, and you’ll never challenge Bode Miller.  But if you stick to the blacks, ski the same run again and again every day until you master it, you’re on your way to becoming a true expert.

The reason the Beatles are selling is not because of nostalgia, but because their music is so fucking good!

People want the singles today, because they’re all that’s worth listening to.  The Beatles gave up imaging forty years ago, they released an album with a white cover. They gave up singles years before that, with "Rubber Soul".  It’s almost like we’re going in reverse, like Mark Mothersbaugh and Devo were seers.  Instead of exploring and growing, we’re stripping away absolutely everything to get the lowest common denominator that appeals to the mass.  Whereas the mass used to come to you, now the product has been homogenized not to offend, to grab you right away.  But this milk shake ultimately makes you sick, and once you’ve recovered, you’ve forgotten it, you’ve moved on.  Whereas we still want the Beatles today.

They sang well, they wrote songs with hooks and they even took chances.  Is it any wonder they’re the biggest band of all time?

4. Whitney Houston "I Look To You"

Sales this week: 87,990
Weeks on: 2
Percentage change: -71
Cume: 398,893

Notice how no one talks about the music?

Whitney can’t come back because she’s not ready.  But she never will be.  Because we want to believe she’s the Whitney of old, and she was never that bright, sunny, vanilla person ever, that was a media myth.  In the Internet age, there are no myths.  If Whitney’s not still on drugs, she sure acts like she is.  You’ve got to be a really hard core fan to care.  And there are just not that many out there.

13. Black Eyed Peas "E.N.D. (Energy Never Dies)"

Sales this week: 43,522
Weeks on: 14
Percentage change: +29
Cume: 1,071,135

The 1910 Fruitgum Company of today.

15. Kings Of Leon "Only By The Night"

Sales this week: 39,713
Weeks on: 51
Percentage change: -11
Cume: 1,312,055

The great rock hope.  Doing it the old-fashioned way.  Breaking through after a slew of albums, peaking a year in, when those not in the know are finally catching on.

Sad thing is we used to have a bunch of Kings Of Leon.  Developing acts that ground it out on the road, who were not about image, but music.  Alas, today no one wants to work that hard.  Hell, the label’s been bitching to me for almost a decade that it’s unfair that KOL were not yet stars.  But they hung in there long enough to find their moment.  And isn’t it interesting they broke in the U.K. first.  In the U.K. they’re still excited about music, adventurous, here we’re more concerned with our mobile phones.

17. Taylor Swift "Fearless"

Sales this week: 33,213
Weeks on: 44
Percentage change: -6
Cume: 3,822,444

It’s the songs, stupid.

She’s been writing forever.  She got it right.

Don’t tell me about the adolescent themes, her thin voice, the music is catchy and contains elements of truth.  That formula never goes out of style.

And the music business never changes.  They’re going to put out a special edition of this album for Christmas, just to make some extra dollars, screwing fans in the process?  I thought Taylor Swift was about fans first.  If every additional track is not available individually on iTunes, expect that legion of fans to cry foul.  And unlike nitwits from the past, Taylor Swift can’t say it wasn’t her fault, that she was ignorant.  You see despite her girlish image, Taylor Swift is damn smart.  How else do you think she became so successful?

21. Colbie Caillat "Breakthrough"

Sales this week: 30,088
Weeks on: 3
Percentage change: -36
Cume: 183,108

The aural equivalent of jug wine.  Nondescript.  To title her album this is to beg the question if she knows what the word means.

Will live and die by the singles.

And since in today’s day and time they release the strongest single first, and you haven’t heard it, you can continue to live in a Colbie-free zone, you can move about the country freely…just stay out of cocktail lounges!

23. Phish "Joy"

Sales this week: 29,122
Debut

Actually got some good reviews.

But Phishheads don’t care about reviews.

This is the modern music business.  So close to the business of thirty five years ago.  Have such dedicated fans that they’ll buy your next release without hearing it first.  And worry only about these fans.

48. Darius Rucker "Learn To Live"

Sales this week: 13,684
Weeks on: 52
Percentage change: -16
Cume: 931,263

A Hootie record.  Serviceable songs delivered in a heartfelt manner.  This still works in country, but not in pop.  In pop you’ve got to dress up like an alien, use computers and have beats that would level a cyclops.  But it’s the country artists who have careers, who people want to see on the road.  And if you still think country is twang, you haven’t listened in eons.

54. Dave Matthews Band "Big Whiskey & the GrooGrux King"

Sales this week: 13,294
Weeks on: 15
Percentage change: +19
Cume: 869,166

A stellar number.  For an album that is far from the band’s finest (check out "Before These Crowded Streets").  There was no hit single, but there’s a ton of fans.  You may call DMB jam band music, I’d call it the best exponent of the modern music business.

64. John Fogerty "Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again"

Sales this week: 10,580
Weeks on: 2
Percentage change: -50
Cume: 31,874

Why?

Why spend all that time making an album when no one cares?

How about cutting ten tracks in two days with Don Was and releasing one a week.  Maybe doing covers until you get one right, that blows up.

This is so old school as to be laughable.  Living legend spends months, years, creating an album that his PR team gets ink about in traditional media and his audience just doesn’t care.  Just play the CCR hits John!

If you’ve got an exclusive with Wal-Mart or Target, if you’ve got a revenue-generating event, sell those albums one way and count your cash.  But if you want to further your career, fuck the album, release the singles, court the hard core fans, and look for the lucky accident.

71. Black Crowes "Before The Frost…Until The Freeze"

Sales this week: 9,308
Weeks on: 2
Percentage change: -71
Cume: 41,829

This band has got an imaging problem.  Everybody thinks Chris Robinson is a dick.  So no matter what music the band makes, most people ignore it.

This guy needs an autobiography, wherein he tells the true story of his marriage to Kate Hudson and reveals some inner torture/pain.

Then, the band should come back via a single at a time.  Going on the road as the opening act for any credible act who’ll have them.  Hell, the DMB would be a good one.  Right now the Crowes function in their own backwater, and that’s not fair, they’re better than that.

78. Green Day "21st Century Breakdown"

Sales this week: 8,457
Weeks on: 18
Percentage change: -5
Cume: 791,574

They should have worked with Rob Cavallo.

Butch Vig gave them cred, but not a sound palatable to the masses.  Fine if the band doesn’t care, but methinks they do.

Unlike Glen Ballard, Rob Cavallo has the ability to make you sound commercial without the appearance of selling out.  And that’s important!

85. Sugarland "Live On The Inside"

Sales this week: 8,092
Weeks on: 6
Percentage change: -26
Cume: 153,578

A disaster.  Especially considering their previous studio album, "Love On The Inside", resides higher on the chart, at number 59, even after 60 weeks, and has sold a cumulative 1,809,502 copies.

The band has fewer fans than it thinks.

People love the singles, not the band.  And the band is hard to love, the two principals seem to have spent years in mugging class.

Also, the live album is dead.  Especially when you can catch all your favorite acts live on YouTube.

Give the live album away free with the ticket.  Coldplay had this right.

99. Journey "Greatest Hits"

Sales this week: 6,691
Weeks on: 121
Percentage change: -6
Cume: 1,246,141

Don’t stop believin’!

Just like Letterman was killed by one appearance on the Oscars, one appearance on the "Sopranos" legitimized Journey.

It had nothing to do with the fans, only to do with the music.  Enough years had passed and with arena rock dead, with all the reasons to hate Journey far in the past, you could admit that you truly loved some of their songs.

I love "Lights".  And "Wheel In The Sky".

112. U2 "No Line On The Horizon"

Sales this week: 5,833
Weeks on: 28
Percentage change: +20
Cume: 997,255

It’s not even platinum!

This could not have been handled any worse.  Expectations were through the stratosphere, then the band went on every awards show known to man trying to convince us "Get On Your Boots" was cool.  It wasn’t.  It sucked.  Who wanted the album after that?

This is what happens when you lose touch with your audience.

U2 was playing to the media.  Their hard core fans were gonna buy a ticket, the rest of the country just didn’t care.  Hit singles can make them care.  But if that’s what they were after, they should have worked with Timbaland.

No one in U2’s camp could sense the change in the weather.  U2’s only hope was to position itself as being underground.  It had to be cool to get their record, word had to spread organically.  I like the album, it’s better than the previous two, but I can’t bring it up in conversation, "No Line On The Horizon" has got a huge stink upon it.

Time for U2 to stunt.  Release a whole live concert free on the Net.  Don’t appear on SNL, do a live show on YouTube.  Do something first, that will get people’s heads to turn.  Stop being desperate, and start being innovative.

Play a house concert in every town where you do a stadium gig.  Show up with acoustic instruments and implore all in attendance to record it and upload it to the Web.

Show up unannounced and open for Kenny Chesney.  Or the aforementioned DMB.  Or even the Jonas Brothers.  Be irreverent.  Blow our minds.  Make us care once again.

119. Rob Thomas "Cradlesong"

Sales this week: 5,419
Weeks on: 11
Percentage change: -11
Cume: 266,443

The name of the band is MATCHBOX TWENTY!

Why make it hard for yourself.

And why play the hit single game?

You’re talented, go for the long haul.

132. Chickenfoot

Sales this week: 4,686
Weeks on: 15
Percentage change: -12
Cume: 311,050

That’s a staggering number, especially for an independent album.

Oh, that’s right, they were tied in with Best Buy.

But someone had to buy it.  They didn’t buy Axl’s fake G N’ R!

This is the Nickelback paradigm.  As Bryan Adams once sang, the kids wanna rock.  And so do the oldsters.

137. Cobra Starship "Hot Mess"

Sales this week: 4,519
Weeks on: 5
Percentage change: -22
Cume: 73,656

What a laugh.  They sell 1,158,148 singles, but no one wants the album.

Then again, the single featured Leighton Meester.  Don’t know who that is?  Don’t worry, she’ll be forgotten soon.

Stunting into oblivion.

Good stunts make us pay attention to something worthwhile.

Bad stunts give us a bit of candy that we consume and then forget.

199. Michael Franti & Spearhead "All Rebel Rockers"

Sales this week: 3,097
Weeks on: 1
Percentage change: +7
Cume: 96,945

My inbox is filling up with people telling me Michael Franti finally has a hit!

Well, he’d better not quit his day job, which is being a touring journeyman.  Hits mean less than ever before.  Because they’re not truly hits.  They’re single sparks in a world full of fires.

You must stop trying for world domination.  Hell, stop trying to dominate completely (unless this turns you on sexually!)  Be thankful anybody is interested, be thrilled people want to pay to see you play.  You’re no longer a star, you’re a musician.  Perez Hilton is a star.  Someone whose movements are cataloged, who is in our faces all the time.  But although smart, I’ve yet to discern any true creative talent in Mr. Lavendeira’s bones.  In other words, you’ve got to love to play.  And you’ve got to work to be good enough for others to pay attention.  And if you’re lucky, you might get lucky, one of your songs will break through.  But musicians are now living off the radar.  They’re itinerant, they’re troubadours.  They’re not sports stars, limited in number, playing for the masses, they’re individuals, who deliver insight into the meaning of life.

We’re finally back in the garden.