[Image description: a collage of photos of the 10 musicians and musical groups featured in this poll. In order from left to right, top to bottom: Lifehouse, Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson, Train, Jennifer Lopez and Ja Rule, Matchbox Twenty, Eve and Gwen Stefani, Dido, Lenny Kravitz, Destiny's Child. End description]
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A lot of alternative rock this year, especially with the Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks chart having major influence over the Billboard Hot 100. Rap and R&B are also blending a lot more, which artists from both genres appearing on each others' tracks.
However, when it comes to music business history, this year kicked off with a bang. 2001 marks the release of iTunes and the iPod, which would heavily alter trends in music listening and try to provide one solution to the issue of music piracy. After the previous decades of listeners being expected to pay full price for a CD, going to $0.99 per song felt like a downgrade in terms of profits. But even with Napster shut down, but piracy still left the music industry scrambling for a solution. With listeners being able to buy individual songs, the rising popularity of iTunes was great for singles, but not the best for album sales. With the iPod, music listening trends were also moving in favor of individual listening as portable music became more accessible. It will take a few years for both this product and platform to reach their cultural and economic peaks, but the trends are starting to shift here.
Also to address the elephant in the room, this was also the year of the September 11 attacks. Despite the event forever affecting American culture, those effects aren't that obvious when looking at this chart. Like with the Vietnam War era, some songs had the event projected onto them. But unlike the Vietnam War era, protest music won't be as prominent in the mainstream. The popular music at the time seemed to want to be defiantly apolitical, whether as a coping mechanism or to avoid public backlash (which we will definitely get to in a few years) differs depending on the artists. But to get to the music itself, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications) famously banned the airplay of a number of songs following the attacks. I'm not going to go over all 165, but previous poll entries featured on this list includes: Walk Like an Egyptian by the Bangles, Johnny Angel by Shelley Fabrares, Bennie and the Jets by Elton John, American Pie by Don McLean, Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bridge over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel, War by Edwin Star, and Jump by Van Halen.