A few short weeks ago, CDs were gathering dust in the nation's record stores, where sales of new albums were down 10% from a year ago. Then along came Ashanti. In its first week of release, her self-titled debut album sold 502,000 copies. After three weeks, Ashanti's album has sold 940,000 copies and is still No. 1 on the charts. "I expected it to be huge, but it was bigger than expected. There was a lot of noise on that record. Everybody was asking about it." What was that I heard about trouble in the music business? Sounds like things are going just fine for those artists with both talent and good marketing. To all the whiners: either go write some good songs already, or get a real job and stop complaining. | 
