Soulja Boy has some of the biggest hits on radio. Lil Wayne collaborates with virtually everyone and is arguably the most inescapable artist in the industry right now. And wunderkind rapper-singer-actor Drake has the most pre-release buzz of any unsigned artist that anyone has ever seen.
But …
As we enter the second half of the final year of the new millennium’s first decade, how will the next 10 years pan out for the hit-makers of today? Will Lady Gaga prove to have staying power in the Madonna mold, or is she closer to Cyndi Lauper? Will Beyoncé still be a pop culture juggernaut? For some perspective, here’s a look at who was topping the charts a decade ago …
In 1999, the top 10 selling artists of the year were:
Ricky Martin
Backstreet Boys
Britney Spears
TLC
Sarah McLachlan
Whitney Houston
Shania Twain
N’Sync
Sugar Ray
Jennifer Lopez
Of those 10 artists, none have had a major hit single in at least four years, and though Britney remains a hot commodity only in the celebrity tabloid circles, her last two albums have barely registered on the population’s radar. None of these artists are at the forefront of popular music anymore, and that doesn’t just mean they’re music isn’t selling. They’re no longer relevant, the sounds and styles that they popularized seem like ancient history to most of the record-buying (or, should we say, record-downloading) public. And, with the exception of Houston and McLachlan, they’re not even heralded as influential or legendary — most of them are simply written off as insubstantial flashes-in-the-pan who rode the wave of late ‘90s pop-resurgence to stardom and then fizzled away.
That’s not to say that artists have a short shelf life; many acts popularity spanned more than ten years — Michael Jackson was the star of the Jackson 5 in 1970, a solo superstar in 1980 and a the biggest global phenomenon in music in 1990 — and many older acts have seen their popularity rise and fall in waves (i.e., The Rolling Stones, Isley Brothers, etc.) and some can still tour behind decades of hit songs regardless of whether or not they release new material. But, looking at the hottest acts of today — who do you think will still be relevant into the next decade? –todd williams
