Let's play a game, /mu/. Can you tell by this chart which year did top-40 stuff go to shit?
1976
top 40 really refers to top 40 singles
otherwise To Be Kind is literally top 40
in which case you could say yeah 2014
>>65801587
2011
Every artist but Adele is good
>>65801587
>good top 40 ended after Nirvana
I see what you did there.
>>65801587
1997
>tfw Titanic ruined pop music
>>65801611
>>65801671
Yeah I admit 20–30 mln copies illustrates my point much more obviously
>>65801702
either way your point was about Nirvana I see that now.
>>65801587
1967
>>65801690
>>65801671
OP here. You know, my point is arguable and all, but I believe '90s was when the top-selling music went to shit. Completely and irreversibly.
Some of the top-selling albums of the '80s were Thriller, Back in Black, Purple Rain, Brothers in Arms, Born in the USA, Appetite for Destruction… True there was unashamed pop there, but pretty good pop too—like Dirty Dancing soundtrack that was actually pretty good. There was some wussy shit there too like Whitney Houston, but it wasn't all about sex appeal.
But the '90s was the era when Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and so on destroyed music market, turning it into an analog of Hollywood/modelling business. Good music is no longer what MOST people hear.
>>65801797
it isn't so much that, it's more that music became image based. You can thank both Madonna and MTV for that. That's not to say that music before that didn't have image attached to it, but when Madonna hit the scene, it showed record companies that risque, shocking, or provacative things really made selling music easier and more efficiently.
That, and also around that time the internet hit and people slowly didn't need to go out and buy their stuff because, hey, you could just get it online.
>>65801711
Well not that much about it because let's face it—if Cobain wouldn't be so handsome, Nevermind would be Neversell.
People often forget that Metallica also sold shitloads of albums at the time; also, while not being in 20-29 mln copies range, there were still Oasis, Green Day and still big success stories like Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead, not to mention G'N'R were still going strong at the time of Nirvana. But that was already the time when "music over looks" mindset was on its way out. It started from the top and gradually pushed actually decent artists out of chart tops and thus zeitgeist.
And in 2000, file sharing actually led to record industry shrinking 3 times, which has only slowed down recently. But album is a pretty dead medium nowadays
>>65801842
>That, and also around that time
Well, more like in 2001, see >>65801885 and picrelated
Unsurprisingly, the last really big albums came out in around 2004. I don't really believe Adele's success is comparable because a lot of her counted "sales" are from streaming which is defined pretty vaguely. In reality, physical digital sales of her albums are much lower—and having a hundred million views video on YouTube doesn't exactly equate to record sales.
