Photo: SSGT Michael R. Holzworth, U.S. Air Force [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
It’s hard to believe that it has been almost twenty five years since Hootie & The Blowfish blew away the record industry away with their mega million selling album Cracked Rear View in 1994. Smack right in the middle of a period of music that had been dominated by the dark grunge sounds of bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Hootie & The Blowfish were an outlier at the time.
If your too young to remember the impact that Hootie & the Blowfish had on the charts, or simply have forgotten how popular they were, the following statistics will knock you off your feet. Just a few months before the band released their debut album Cracked Rear View, they had been playing the bar scene. Within a few weeks after release, the album basically went viral before we even used the word viral. Cracked Rear View became one of the fastest selling albums in history. The album went on to be certified 16 times platinum and has become one of the biggest selling albums of all time.
Can the return of Hootie & The Blowfish ignite CD sales once again? It’s a very different world that we live in now since the CD dominated music sales in the 1990’s. It will be interesting to see how Hootie & The Blowfish do in their return.