In Continuum.

1. Eminem 31,127,000

2. The Beatles 27,591,000

3. Tim McGraw 24,295,000

4. Toby Keith 24,189,000

5. Britney Spears 22,937,000

6. Kenny Chesney 21,396,000

7. Nelly 21,206,000

8. Linkin Park 21,125,000

9. Creed 20,398,000

10. Jay Z 19,379,000

11. Nickleback 19,158,000

12. Josh Groban 19,115,000

13. Rascal Flatts 18,831,000

14. Metallica 18,490,000

15. Alan Jackson 18,479,000

16. *NSYNC 18,402,000

17. Dixie Chicks 18,293,000

18. Johnny Cash 17,860,000

19. Kid Rock 17,606,000

20. Celine Dion 17,579,000

Watch it, and watch it close. Witness as the fall of mankind unfolds before your eyes in the form of a list. The list that you are looking at above you is the top 20 album sellers of the 2000s, and I must say that it is probably one of the most depressing lists I have ever seen. When you have artistes and bands like Kid Rock, Rascal Flatts (who are they anyway?), Creed and Nickleback on a list like that, you know your list is supposed to be depressing. When you have four country-artistes on the best selling list of albums, you also know that your list is supposed to be depressing. This is the reality of things, ladies and gentlemen. We are listening to junk on the radio and we are taking it in as the radio stations blast these mainstream crap into the airwaves. This list, or the majority of the list, is the reason why your parents would tell you that music is dead these days, and deep inside your heart you could almost taste the truth in that statement. I mean, in their time, they had the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, the Whos, Sex Pistols - you get my point. From the 50s to the 60s, from the 70s to the 80s and through the 90s, there were people or bands that actually defined cultures and defied convention. If the majority of this list is going to define my culture in the 2000s, I am going to shoot myself in the mouth.

I grew up listening to the so-called "divas" because my mother was a fan. When my mother wasn't practicing violin pieces in her room, she'd be playing the likes of Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Celine Dion over the stereo. Those were the days when power ballads ruled the airwaves, and people who were on MTV and the radio actually knew how to carry a tune. But how we are, seeing the kings and queens of yesteryears falling into their own ruins. Celine Dion is still working in music, but she is the butt of many people's jokes around the world. Then we have Mariah Carey, a major sell-out who thought that venturing into the realm of hip-hop and R&B would garner her the fame that she lost over the years. She sure sold a lot of records, but then she is no longer the female singer that everybody were floored by in the past. Right now, all she does in her songs are to sing in an indecipherable manner, along with those ear-piercing screeches that she does from time to time that feels like finger nails to the chalkboard. Whitney Houston is still battling drugs I think, and she hasn't churned out a decent tunes in years. Michael Jackson has been touching little children for a while, and thus are the fates of our past heroes and heroines.

It is not difficult to agree with your parents who have been through everything, that music is dead. A lot of people, in fact, would tell you that music is dead. Just go to YouTube and look for any song by Marvin Gaye or Issac Hayes, and you'd realize that they don't make music like that anymore. No one looking like them, with their age, is going to sell as many records today because the market has changed. The younger demographics these days, the children born after 1990s, were too young to register all the good music in the 90s. By the time they were able to notice anything other than noise and voices in their eardrums, they'd have opened up their doors to the horrors of the 2000s music. Compared to all the decades before, the decade that we are living in right now probably has the most horrendous music, and it is not difficult to understand why. Music these days are produced to make money, and you do not make good music by following a formula. That is not to say that they didn't make crappy music in the past forty years or so. But the point is this: there are more crappy music now, more than ever. Don't even get me started on the Asian music industry, because that is another vast wasteland that I am not even going to touch.

You would usually expect bands like Creed or Nickleback to appear on a list just to be made fun of. If you type in the words "the worst band in the world" into Google's search engine, the recommended search results are going to include either of the bands mentioned above. There is no rational explanation as to why these bands managed to sell as many records as they have in the past decade, and it shall remain a mystery in the years to come when our future generations, hopefully, would look back and laugh at just how bad the music in this decade is. I say "hopefully", because I dearly hope that our music is not going to going into this spiral of death, and that the future generations are going to realize that we need some kind of music revolution. We need more music festivals like Bonaroo to remind ourselves that there are music in this world that are still worth listening to, music that are not necessarily on the top-whatever lists around the world. The truth is, the only difference between the music today and the music in the 60s is that all the good music now has taken a step back into the backstage, while all the horrid music has taken the front. As a result, there is a misconception that music is dead in our decade - wrong. Music is not dead, and it is very much alive.

Good music, or better music, they are still around. Good music isn't dead, it is just thriving in a different place other than the common avenues of music. Good music are still being written, produced and dished out on a monthly basis, and you can find them only if you try to look deeper than the surface. They are everywhere, but the only problem is that they are not popular on the airwaves anymore. Not popular, because people these days are not willing to take risks, even if it is just taking a chance at a different kind of music from their normal cup of tea. They want something they are comfortable with, some generic product of the industry. I say "industry", because we are no longer talking about the "music industry" anymore. This is a factory, like an automobile assembly line, putting out singers and boybands like they are canned soup. Disney, being one of the biggest culprits, have been churning out teenage singing "sensations" that really are just generic pop stars with no talents, whatsoever. I mean, when you are dishing out bands like The Jonas Brothers, you know that you are not in it for the music at all. The Jonas Brothers is the epitome of whatever that is wrong about our music industry.

As I was saying, music isn't really dead. The problem is that good music are harder to come by now, or at least it is seemingly that way. You cannot find the truly awesome music on the radio or on MTV anymore, because those avenues are what the industry use to spread their filth. You have to dig deep now, deeper than usual, and deeper than what they'd spoon feed into your mouth through the airwaves. It takes a little bit of effort, like hiking through a jungle to get to an ancient ruin in South America. The journey is going to be long and sometimes hard, but the reward is probably going to be amazing. It takes a bit of effort for the most part, but there are so many tools on the Internet that'd help you to find them a lot easier. They are like little compasses and maps for you to find your way around this vast land of awesome music. More often than not, you are going to come up with music that makes you scratch your head a bit. They are not exactly music that is bad, because you know that they are not. They are just music that makes you think "what am I listening to here?" It overwhelms you for a while, and sometimes intimidates. But that is where the fun begins, and it is all a part of that magical journey to discovery.

But I think the death of music really is in the laziness of people nowadays. I think we want everything to be convenient, to come to us faster, and then to come to us even faster. If you are driving in your car and you want music in the background while you are driving, you want your music to come with the turn of a dial - fast. You don't even need to know what we are listening to most of the time, because music to us isn't important anymore. It's just the mentality of having music as some kind of side dish, you know. Music used to be the steak in everybody's meal back in the old days. Music had the power to move people, to define cultures, to start movements. Music right now is like the coleslaw that nobody really wants to eat, though there are still people who love it. People who actually attempts to eat the coleslaw pours chilli sauce all over it just to cover up the taste, and that is how it is like today - a movement from a steak to a coleslaw. It is really pathetic, but that is the situation right now. People do not see the need to make the effort and find out more about music. They want their music to come easy, and they want the public radio or television to tell them what bands to like, what songs to sing, what kind of genre to love.

I love the fact that the music that I choose has become an integral part of my identity, you know. Beyond what the radio and the television offers, there is a world of music waiting for you to explore. Just imagine all the different bands pinned onto a giant cork board, and you are supposed to take some of them down and pin them on your t-shirt to make known to others that you love that band's music. Every band has a stack of badges, and a few people could be taking from the same stack at the same time. No two people in the room are going to have the same combination of badges, and every badge then becomes a kind of identity somehow. You have chosen what and how you want to be represented in terms of the kind of music you love, and you have actively looked for the kind of music that you love. Instead of having some entity give you options A to D, you now have everything from A to Z, and then all the numbers stretching out into infinity. I feel that these combination of bands and artistes defines me in a certain way, because they all react together like some chemical reaction to form a part of my personality and character somehow. And the fact that I found a part of myself through this active search - it makes me feel satisfied and happy.

I love music to death, and there is rarely a moment in my room whereby you do not hear music coming out from my speakers. Every time somebody out there says that "music is dead", it pains me to know that there is someone else who hasn't bothered to look deeper into the realm of music. I contend that maybe, just maybe, we have even better musicians today than we have a decade before. We have a range of music that is so wide, that it is impossible to comprehend the scope any longer. We have ran out of words to classify these music into genres, and we are creating sub-sub genres from sub-genres. From there, we are branching out even further, deeper, and wider into the limitless possibilities of music. It all takes time to find, to discover, to learn. It takes a lot of time to step out of your comfort zone, but then nobody said it was easy to begin with. Everybody started with a band they love from the radio, but then only a handful of us realize that everything sounds the same, and that the things on the radio aren't enough anymore. So you look, and you look, and you look some more. In the end, you find that music isn't as dead as some people put it out to be.

It is a living, breathing legend that people only whisper about deep in the night. It is a quiet assassin waiting for the perfect time to strike. It is the crouching tiger that is waiting to claw at its prey, and it is just waiting for the perfect moment to come back into the limelight. In some ways, I am selfish about the kind of music that I love. In some ways, I like that the kind of music I listen to do not even exist on Wikipedia. I suppose when you take your music library this seriously, you want to keep everything to yourself somehow. But, in view of our future generations, you feel like you have some kind of obligation to spread the word, to let them know that this has not always been a decade of horrid music and teenage boy bands. This is a decade of quiet music, the kind of music that has remained silent. Or rather, not silent, but just in soundproof rooms where you cannot hear them very well, that's all. I feel selfish, but at the same time I love to share. It is a conflicting feel that I am still trying to deal with from time to time. But, you know how it is, there is such joy in giving, even if it involves you sending a simple mp3 to a friend. To me, music is not dead. At least inside me, it is a vibrant world of musical notes that are alive and breathing.