AC/DC’s new album, “Black Ice,” has not only has topped the charts in more than two dozen countries, but also debuts atop the latest U.S. album chart with sales of more than 780,000 copies.
We knew they were doing well, but check this out:
Gradually, and without getting much media attention, AC/DC has become the most popular currently active rock band in the country, to judge by albums sold. Since 1991, when Nielsen SoundScan started tracking music sales, this Australian band has sold 26.4 million albums, second only to the Beatles, and more than the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin. Over the past five years, as CD sales have cratered, AC/DC albums have sold just as well as or better than ever; the band sold more than 1.3 million CDs in the United States last year, even though it hasn’t put out any new music since 2000.
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“They have a purist approach,” said Steve Barnett, the chairman of Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. (He also managed the band from 1982 to 1994.) “Their instinct was always to do the right thing for fans, think long term and not be influenced by financial rewards.”
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AC/DC’s insistence on selling albums has almost certainly helped keep its sales from declining. And although many music executives believe that not selling tracks online leads fans to download music illegally, AC/DC’s music is downloaded from file-sharing sites less than that of Led Zeppelin, which does sell music digitally, according to BigChampagne, a company that monitors peer-to-peer services.
Metal has always defined itself by doing what it believes is right, not following the crowd. Unlike teeny angstbopper music, it does not define itself solely by not being part of the crowd, but by doing what it believes is eternally right.
Like good Romantic poets (Blake, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth), metal worships the ancient, the powerful and the definitive. It hates the cushy, the Crowd, and the kind of mental illusion designed to make life safe ‘n’ comfy at the expense of its intensity and meaning.
AC/DC, despite being a watered-down version of this, have continued to dominate by showing the world that a strong spirit that says YES to life instead of whining about how unfair, inequitable, painful, fatal, etc. life can be, in the long run, is what the people who keep our civilizations running want.
