It’s another day, and yet another Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation album is available for consumption. Not to make anyone feel old or anything, but we’re at volume #41! (In the UK, where the series began in 1983, they’re at #80). Artists featured this time around include LMFAO, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and, for those who prefer to rock, Nickelback.

If the past is any indicator of the future, this album is bound to be a hit. In a recent press release, the Now! team states that “every album in the numeric US series has reached Billboard’s Top 10, and 15 Now! releases have reached #1, second only to The Beatles in chart history.” Indeed, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, every Now! album has achieved either Gold or Platinum status, with only a few exceptions. In 2006, Slate music critic, Jody Rosen, wondered if Now! could save the music business, calling the franchise “one of the great success stories in the record business over the last decade.”

So, in our age of digital downloading and cloud computing, of Pandora and Sirius and Spotify and even YouTube, how are these records comprised of jams found everywhere still so successful?

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Today at Flavorpill, we learned just how snarky Nickelback’s Twitter account can be. We watched a badass panda burning trash in a shopping cart for warmth in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We uncovered the level of artifice that goes into crafting daytime courtroom TV shows. We pondered calling the G-Spot (now said not to exist), the G-Zone. We were weirded out by this Obama/Hulk mashup. We stared at a red dot that made our eyes do funny things. We listened to some of the purplest musical artists of all-time. We giggled at Alec Baldwin’s Piers Morgan impersonation. We found out what the Vimeo updates will entail. We watched a comedian attempt to sleep at 13 celebrities’ homes. We wanted to travel back in time to this neon New York office building in the 1980s. And finally, we loved Iggy Pop’s description of his job as Record Store Day Ambassador. He said he felt like, “ … a representative from some exotic jungle full of life and death and sex and anger, called upon to wear a leopard skin and translate joy to the world of the dead.” He should probably get a side gig writing job listings.

You always knew Nickelback were terrible, but did you realize that their music makes a very effective contraception? It’s true! The dating site Tastebuds.fm, which revealed back in April that Coldplay fans are prudes, has just released some fascinating new data on the way our musical preferences affect our sex lives. After surveying thousands of Tastebuds users, they’ve determined which bands are the biggest turnoffs. Nickelback tops the list of acts mostly likely to send a potential partner running for the hills, with Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga following fairly close behind. When Tastebuds divided responses by gender, the Nickelback-Bieber-Gaga trifecta still topped both lists. The biggest difference thereafter was that women were actually more bothered by a partner who enjoyed female pop stars (Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj) than men, whose top 10 turnoffs included Coldplay, U2, Lil Wayne, and Creed. See the gender breakdown infographic after the jump. If we had to guess, we’d say this has something to do with heterosexual preferring to date gender-normative men and women. Anyone else have a theory?

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Bands want an audience. For better or worse, in the 21st century it’s more likely that potential fans will see an image of a band before they hear their music, and make a preconceived judgment of if they will like them or not accordingly. Therefore, it’s important for bands to have quality photographs to lure in new listeners. The problem is that a lot of band photographs are boring and predictable. At some point, certain categories were established and now most musical groups follow suit like a heard of cattle. It doesn’t matter if the band is well-established or just scheduling their first practice — all bands are susceptible to producing these cliched images.

Since we don’t expect musicians to be virtuosos in every medium, we thought we’d take a critical look at 5 categories of band photography so that other up and coming acts can break out of the formula. Take a look after the jump.

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It is no secret that trade publication Billboard is painfully irrelevant. However, its latest “Artists of the Decade” list cannot be debated — it has been objectively compiled. Never mind the fact that Billboard equated “Artists of the Decade” with “the 20 music stars with the best performance on the Billboard 200 albums chart and the Hot 100 over the last ten years.” We let this happen, at least when we still bought CDs. After the jump, explanations on how Creed, Nelly, Nickelback, and others snuck into the Top 20 most-sold albums of the decade list.

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Perhaps in response to Mashable’s fiercely Twittered article “Internet Explorer 6 Must Die,” Windows has released a new advertisement to spur the growth of its most recent Internet browser. Since IE6 is, according to its fiercest critics, “inhibiting the process of all future web development as we know it,” the kind folks at Windows are offering a free Nickelback download packaged with Internet Explorer 8. The tag-line reads as follows: “Rock Out Your Internet.” Read More »