There is a Reason Why Rock Music Dominates the Top Albums Charts and Rap Music is Being Left Behind ..

According to an article I've read on antimusic.com people may listen to other genre of music but the albums that they are really buying are rock albums. I personally believe that there are a lot of clear reasons to why rock music inspires people to go out and purchase the record, and why other forms of music like pop and hip-hop have a rainy day following. Consider the following; when it comes to hip-hop the primary marketing tool used to promote these records have come down to one of a few things, the first is beef between artists, the second is beats and the third is in collaborations. You do not see rock artists positing their music through any of those devices, the irony of which is that it is not as though rock artists or groups disagree with each other, or hate each other, and it is not as though the music has not evolved with respect to the rock genre.

If anything rock music has always been expansive and experimented with synthesizers, audio samples, and recording engineering tricks. In fact the arena and emo genre of rock owe a lot to progress that has been made in the studio. When you pick up a rock album, it is primarily either that band or that singer, with the same producers (as opposed to hip-hop, urban music where different producers are brought in on different tracks to appeal to diverse tastes), and rock artists still talk about what they are going through and are definitively more "blue collar" than hip-hop has been in a while. With rap music, the emphasis on amoral behavior and materialism has alienated a lot of listeners and pushed them towards underground hip-hop music. About the only mainstream hip-hop artist that even attempts to maintain what used to be the status quo of hip-hop that exists is Eminem; people talk about Jay, but a lot of his own lyrics push the same old tired materialist and consumerist agendas. Other artists like 50 cent that said they would stay above pop music have digressed to the same tactics and have failed us.

If you want to know about the staying power of rock music, pick up an old Radiohead album from the eighties or even a Deftones album and give it a whirl. The music does not sound dated, and even when these groups release new material it still sounds fresh. The music has not progressed towards the point where it has left the majority of its fans behind. Rap music on the other hand tends to change around every six months, and there is not enough of a following behind real hip-hop music to even bother to reference Soundscan to see how much those artists are selling. We are at a point where for the most part, rock has changed, yet in a lot of ways has not, since the early days. This makes the music more accessible, and more of an investment for a music lover, than other genre of music.

In fact I was tempted to pick up a used copy of Radiohead's "Ok Computer" the other day. The album came out over 12 years ago but still sounds fresh and is well worth a listen. You simply do not get that in mainstream rap music. If true hip-hop, which has stayed consistent with the sound that was developed back in the nineties, could rise about the status quo of commercialized rap music rock would not be in the position that it is today. A lot of people who used to listen to rap, particularly from the punk rock scene, have went back to listening to rock all over again because real hip-hop is becoming rare and something of a novelty. So I can pick up a Radiohead or Coldplay record, which I can listen to 20 years from now, or pick up that new album by Wale; which would you do ...