Change in rock music economics?

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: The world’s greatest rock phenomenon is what The Guardian called them back in September 1991, which was when Guns N’ Roses last issued any original music. Back then, midnight saw fans lining up outside the record stores, to buy up Use Your Illusion. This week’s release has had a dramatically different launch. Just as the other big album of the season AC/DC’s Black Ice is a Wal-Mart exclusive in the US, Chinese Democracy is being sold only by electronic retailer Best Buy. Given that this is perhaps the most awaited rock album ever (17 years!), composed by a band brand that still boasts the fourth-biggest US debut of all times (Appetite for Destruction in 1987), produced at a cost of over $13m, it’s priced cheaply at $11.99. And yet, crowds aren’t climbing on top of each other to lap it up.

Sure, its pre-release MySpace streaming saw 25 plays per second on Thursday and it climbed to the iTunes (US) top by Monday morning. Also at such spaces, Chinese audiences could eavesdrop on the “sensitive” songs that their government wouldn’t let them access over the sales counters. But relative newbie Kanye West looks set to best old-guard rock. That Chinese Democracy will underperform Guns N’ Roses’ late 20th century trade is a pretty predictable offshoot of a shifting paradigm, wherein the universal blockbuster with its power to define an era (think the sixties without the Beatles) simply cannot triumph the demographic divisions that new media obliges. No wonder Billboard magazine’s top 200 albums accounted for a smaller percentage of total sales ever in 2007.