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"Alternative rock has become Top 40 rock," says Jason Markey, an artists' representative for Arista Records. "Top 40 rock has always been disposable, and that's where alternative rock is now leaning." David Sonenberg, who manages the Fugees, Joan Osborne and other music acts, says too many record companies have signed too many one-hit alternative acts and thus diluted the quality of the genre (it's an old musical story--just see Tom Hanks' period comedy on the subject, That Thing You Do). "With a lot of the music, it's hard to distinguish one band from another," complains Hooman Majd, executive vice president of Island Records. "I've seen A&R people [the executives who are responsible for scouting and signing bands], who know music better than anyone, hear a record come on, and even they can't tell which band it is."
Sometimes a record label's attention span is even shorter than the public's, which means that even promising bands don't have a chance to develop followings. "A major label will sign an alternative-rock band and put in six months of invested time," says Wendy Powell, assistant to the senior vice president of retail sales at Tower Records. "Then, if they are not making superstar sales, they stop pushing them, and they become a write-off."
On the other hand, some musicians have nothing but their own bad luck, or bad attitudes, to blame for their commercial missteps. Pearl Jam, R.E.M. and Nirvana did not mount much of a publicity campaign or tour to support their new albums because, in the case of Pearl Jam, the band has become too haughty to do interviews and is involved in a long-running feud with Ticketmaster; in the case of R.E.M., the band was plagued with health-related problems and decided to skip a major tour; and in the case of Nirvana, the record--a live album--was released in the wake of lead singer Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the trio's surviving band members could not mount a successful tour. Of course, the problems might also have been due to the fact that the R.E.M. CD was not as strong musically as some of the band's earlier efforts, and that Pearl Jam's CD was also substandard.
Not all the pop-music news is dire. While Hootie and the Blowfish's current album, Fairweather Johnson, has not sold as well as the affable Southern band's debut, it has moved a hefty 2 million copies, which is more than one would expect a band with the word Hootie in its name would ever sell. And while homegrown talents struggle, two of the best-selling performers in the U.S. this year turned out to be Canadian--Alanis Morissette, a wishy-washy pop singer turned vengeful rocker, and Celine Dion, a wishy-washy pop singer who has become an internationally best-selling wishy-washy pop singer. The Haitian-American hip-hop band the Fugees also scored a breakthrough this year with their sophomore album, The Score, which has sold more than 5 million copies so far (their debut sold only 130,000). A look at any recent Billboard chart shows that hard-core rap continues to be a best-selling genre. And the Smashing Pumpkins' double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which has sold more than 7 million copies so far, demonstrates that when a band does take chances and makes great music, the alternative-rock genre can still be rewarding and lucrative.