For those about to rock, apparently It's better to be in the UK

I’ve determined that Great Britain must be Music Heaven. For one, Radiohead hails from there, which is enough in itself. I won’t go into the laundry list of other bands from across the pond that defined a large part of rock as we know it, but I will mention one of the newest ones, if anything because they are record-holders. It’s the Arctic Monkeys.

I often read Metacritic for music reviews, and came across Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. I soon discovered that their album sold more copies in its first week than any other album in UK's history. I can't find it for the life of me, but I think the record-holder here is N*sync (I believe at one time Backstreet Boys held it, and also Eminem at one time). So we get them, and UK gets a kick-ass punk record. What gives?

More than anything, I just find it interesting that musical taste in the UK seems skewed toward rock, while over here it's flagrantly skewed toward top-40, which usually isn't rock music. But then again, I might be wrong.

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P.S. On a completely random note, when I first bought Dookie back in the day, I thought that Green Day were British.