Here Today... Gone To Hell!

Great article about how good music continues to sell. 

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20070716/APE/707160749

Here's the GNR part....

NEW YORK -- Much of the rock 'n' roll and pop canon is well established.

Buying the albums of `60s and `70s acts like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley is akin to a rite of passage for any young music fan. These are the artists that baby boomers love to keep buying, and with whom seemingly every teenager at some point experiments. (Remember A.J. hearing Bob Dylan for the first time in the "Sopranos" finale?)

Now that the `80s and `90s are ancient history, what albums are people still buying from those decades? Do critical favorites like Radiohead and the Pixies grow more popular with time? Or do the Backstreet Boys and Madonna still rule the charts?

The short answer is that, above all, people are buying vintage Metallica, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Guns 'N Roses and, well, Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

AC/DC's "Back in Black" (1980) last year sold 440,000 copies and has thus far sold 156,000 this year, according to the Nielsen SoundScan catalog charts, which measure how well physical albums older than two years old are selling. (All figures for this article were provided by Nielsen SoundScan.)

Those "Back in Black" numbers would make most contemporary CDs a success. Metallica's self-titled 1991 album is altogether the second-biggest selling album of the Nielsen SoundScan era, which began in 1991. "Metallica" sold 275,000 copies last year.

Bon Jovi's greatest hits collection "Cross Road" last year sold 324,000 copies, while Guns 'N Roses "Appetite for Destruction" (1987) sold 113,000. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Christmas Eve and Other Stories" (1996) continues to be a holiday favorite; it was bought 289,000 times last year.

I wonder why they didn't mention the Greatest Hits as well? If you combine AFD and GH, they probably sold 500,000 to 750,000 records last year alone. GH is number one on the Top Pop Catalog at Billboard again this week.
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/index.jsp  scroll down.. : ok:

Appetite sold less than all those shit bands. Yes I hate ac/dc and metallica.

I think it's important to note that Appetite is still killing all that pop crap that we were forced to listen to in the late 90s.

All the best selling material is hard rock.  Why are record labels not picking up on this?  Why are they continuing to release garage like Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson, and Avril Lavigne?  They know these artists have no shelf life.

probably because they are lame. plus, they tend to go for the front end money making , not caring for longevity or developing careers. too much effort for them i guess!