Make fun of the Backstreet Boys all you want, but prepare to eat some crow when their first studio album in five years, “Never Gone,” debuts in the top three–perhaps number one– on this week’s album sales charts.

It’s always a feat to brag about. Record labels do everything they can to ensure their top acts debut in first, because it means higher sales in the album’s second and third weeks, and more after that. People want what’s hot. A top three debut isn’t that bad either.

When the final figures are in, the Boys will have sold about 300,000 copies of the album in its first week, more than halfway towards gold status (500,000 copies sold) in just seven days on the shelves.

But when their last album, “Black and Blue,” was released in November of 2000, it sold almost 1.6 million copies in its first week. Put your calculators away; that’s more than five times the amount of “Never Gone.”

At that rate of decline, Fred Durst will soon be bragging about his comparably large fan base.

Consider this: “Kamikaze,” the latest album by fast-rapping Twista, debuted at number one in February of 2004, selling over 300,000 copies in its first week. Chances are if you’re a Backstreet Boys fan, you have no idea who Twista is. And if Twista walked down the busiest street in your city, nobody would stop him for a photo or an autograph (no disrespect towards Twista).

So what does that mean? The Backstreet Boys and Twista will have similar sales figures. The Backstreet Boys are a band that wants to be idolized by every record-buying female on our fine planet; Twista is a rapper who appears on the occasional R. Kelly song and can be heard on urban radio stations about once a week.

There’s a theory in the music business that fads in music are on a five year cycle. What’s hot now won’t be hot in five years, and what was hot five years ago isn’t hot now.

The Backstreet Boys were hot five years ago. You don’t need a calculator to do this math.






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