Year in Review 2001 | Music

Updated August 5, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

Categories Best Artist Best Trend Hot Shots Album of the Year National Spirit Britney... Exhausted Artists Legends Related Links Recordings of 2001 Music Awards Entertainment Bios

Perhaps in his next book, Harry Potter will decide to become a rock star.

It's the sort of awakening the music industry could use right now—a new phenomenon that could trigger a rush of buying among a frenzied public. The Beatles and Elvis wrapped into one. Frank Sinatra meets Michael Jackson and Kurt Cobain. Somewhere out there, there's got to be a new sensation, and despite all those millions of albums sold, it still doesn't sound like *N Sync.

Music didn't have anything like its own version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in 2001. If there was a trend at all, it was the return of rock and a shift to dark, anguished, hard rock. The turning point came in May when Staind, a raging Western Massachusetts band fronted by High Times poster child Aaron Lewis, sold 716,000 copies of its album Break The Cycle the first week after it was released.

It wasn't the only hard-rock band that made the most of 2001. System of a Down, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Creed, Tool, Slipknot, and Nickelback all scored big at the cash registers and on the road, but none of that was enough to lift the industry out of a year of stagnation. Instead of concentrating on new acts, labels often seemed distracted, mostly by their obsession with digital copying of CDs and Internet trading. Napster was forced to take thousands of titles off its website, but countless other web-based music services were popping up in Napster's place, on a daily basis.

Just how distracted was the industry? When all was said in done, Billboard reported that its No. 1 album of 2001 in terms of sales was the Beatles hits collection 1. That sure says a whole lot about a band that's been out of business for 30 years, but it doesn't say much about the state of music at the moment.

Fortunately, there were some positive developments amid the malaise, and there were highlights and lowlights galore in 2001. Here's a sampling:

BEST ARTIST–U2

The band toured all year and provided hope and inspiration to hundreds of thousands while successfully meeting its stated goal: to reclaim its mantle as the best rock 'n' roll band in the world.

BEST TREND—NEO-SOUL

Males like Maxwell and D'Angelo were dominating this movement up until recently, but lately it's been ladies like Jill Scott, Angie Stone, and Macy Gray at the forefront. But none of them made as much of a splash as did 20-year-old Alicia Keys, whose debut disc, Songs in A Minor, was a masterpiece. Hands-down, Keys was this year's best new artist.

HOT SHOTS