This is a little dated, but it doesn't matter. As some may recall, Creed Inc bassist Brian Marshall once had a sad (covered by CMT no less!) that Pearl Jam is a good band and all but is just baffled about how they fail to appreciate the importance of ROI in determining their asset performance ratings. Oh how the former masters became all studentish and whatnot.
"Pearl Jam tends to... in their recent albums, has gone in such a different direction, which is fine, but looking at their album sales and their fans, you can just see the decline," Marshall told KNDD. Statistically speaking, Pearl Jam has seen a steady decline since the release of its sophomore album, "Vs.," in 1993, which sold 5.69 million copies, followed by 1994's "Vitalogy" (4.54 million), 1996's "No Code" (1.34 million), and 1998's "Yield" (1.48 million), according to SoundScan. To date, Pearl Jam's new album, "Binaural," has sold some 408,000 copies. In comparison, Creed has sold 4.4 million copies of its 1997 debut, "My Own Prison," and has already sold 3.86 million of its newest record, 1999's "Human Clay," which is still holding strong in the Top 10 of the "Billboard" Pop Albums chart after 37 weeks in release. In the KNDD interview, Marshall also said that while he listened to Pearl Jam throughout his collegiate days, he didn't understand why the band now chose to "write songs without hooks."Songs without hooks I tell ya! How is anyone supposed to know they exist if people don't get all hooked up from their car radios while their minds are pre-occupied on who will be in the bottom 3 tonight!
The whole dichotomy of the artistic yin to the business yang; perfectly summed up in the difference between grunge (a term hardly embraced by those categorized that way) and post-grunge.
