To fans of any kind of rock, may 18, 1999, seemed like the end of the world...the Backstreet Boys released their new cd called Millennium...on that first day, it sold more than 500,000 copies...by the end of the week, it had sold 1,134,000, a new all-time sales record...

And those are just the u.s. Numbers...add in the rest of the world and the total was much higher...

And it was only going to get twice as bad...just 308 days later, ‘N sync–another blood boy band–set an even scarier record...by the end of its first week in the stores, their No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million copies...

And just 56 days after that, Britney Spears sold half a million copies of Oops!...I Did It Again on day one and 1,319,193 in its first seven days....

When the dust cleared at the end of 2000, it was clear that vacuous pop music had taken over the universe...these CDs weren’t just selling by the tens of millions....they were selling by the hundreds of millions...

In second place was rap and hip-hop, thanks to people like Eminem, Nelly and Dr. Dre...the biggest selling rock records of the year were from Sreed, Santana and a Beatles r compilation that featured songs that were more than 35 years old...

The prognosis wasn’t good...if rock–all rock–wasn’t dead, it was at least very, very ill...and unless somebody did something, it looked like it was all over...

This is chapter 14 of the complete history of alt-rock...

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