'Americans have awful taste.'

I have a couple of addictions, and iTunes is one of them. As I was fervently downloading music the other day, I started to wonder what the rest of America was listening to. So, I decided to check out the billboard charts. It was what I expected: Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Fergie, Beyoncè, and a slew of past American Idol contestants dominated the charts. I don’t listen to any of these “musicians,” except for JT of course—I got my SexyBack several months ago. It then occurred to me that most of my friends and family members don’t listen to “popular” music either, which begs the question: Who is listening to this music anyway? Then I read this article that said that because people today are given so many options for listening to music—iTunes, MySpace, YouTube, eMusic, ringtones, streams from Yahoo! and AOL, illegal file-sharing—that it’s really difficult to determine billboard charts.

These charts are meant to reflect the popularity of music and track trends of the buying public. The thing is, kids aren’t buying CDs from the store anymore, and except for a few of my holdout friends (Aaron), most people I know don’t care about having a physical copy of a CD that they’re gonna rip onto their computer anyway. If the average American is listening to music by other means than buying albums and singles, then it probably isn't a good relfection of what America is really listening to. This means that the people that are having the biggest impact on the billboard charts are probably people over 35 who still think iPod means "payment on delivery," or people of lower socioeconomic background that can't afford one, or a compter for that matter.

On a positive note, however, with this ever shrinking CD market, indie rock bands like Modest Mouse, The Shins, and Bright Eyes have scored big on the billboard charts this year due to the obsessive allegiance of their fan base who insist on buying old fashioned CDs. (I digress). My point is, there’s no chart right now that combines all the ways people are listening to music today to get a very clear view of who is the most popular. Which means that many of the bands that I like might be really popular across America, but because of file-sharing or the burning of CDs, the charts will never relfect that.

Of course, I could be dead wrong, judging from the popularity of American Idol. James Poniewozik, from Time magazine, spent four pages trying to explain the popularity of American Idol and all of its zealous fans out there, to which one of his readers said, "it takes only four words: Americans have awful taste." Is he right?