How do you know when you’re at the dawn of a new pop era? It’s not like someone sends a memo. Sure, occasionally there’s a well-timed cultural event that offers a hint—the disastrous Altamont festival in December 1969, which signaled… Read more

Cassandra (Tia Carrere): You’ve heard it? Wayne (Mike Myers): Exqueeze me? Have I seen this one before? Frampton Comes Alive?! Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came… Read more

Let’s ignore the uncanny timing of Whitney Houston passing the night before the Grammys, a showcase for music royalty conceived to honor pop queens like her. A better measure of Houston’s legacy is sitting right on top of Billboard‘s two… Read more

Every year, when I get involved in Grammy debates with my cooler friends, I tell them the problem with the awards isn’t that they reward mass-appeal schlock. If the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is doing its job… Read more

Remember the album cut—the track deep on a disc that fans knew best, that only cool radio stations would play? Like so many cherished things from before the iTunes era, it’s essentially extinct. My evidence for this bold and seemingly… Read more

Famously, Nirvana’s major-label debut in 1991 was only expected by David Geffen Company to sell about 100,000 albums, tops. That’s about how much indie godfathers Sonic Youth sold for DGC with their major-label debut, and surely, for Kurt Cobain’s little… Read more

The national star-making machinery only begins to take you seriously when you command the field more than once. Just like, say, GOP presidential candidates, pop acts can’t chart one strong number and assume dominance is permanently theirs. They’ve got to… Read more

Thanks to her husband, Katy Perry considers herself as an honorary Brit. But as the most frequent current inhabitant of the Billboard charts, she must wish we were all anglophiles. If only America had a Christmas No. 1 competition as… Read more

Later this week, Billboard is expected to announce its tallies for the biggest hits of 2011. And what a year for music it’s been. Remember all those big hits: “Like a G6,” “We R Who We R,” “Raise Your Glass,”… Read more

When you go see a movie at a Saturday half-price matinee, should it count toward that weekend’s box office? You paid less than the guy who saw the movie Friday night. Does that mean your viewing shouldn’t count? What about… Read more