Why exactly was Nickelback so hated?

Oversaturation of the market.

It's the Dane Cook effect.

People can only take so much.

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Had some good songs

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They were ultra formulaic. Most of their songs sounded very similar because they followed similar chord progressions.

Rock is supposed to be counter-culture and rebellious, even though much of that aesthetic is fake and contrived. Whenever a band is perceived to be corporate, or mainstream, they attract hate.

Nickelback is the prime example of this. They were no different than a lot of bands, but they got ick attached to them.

They still made, and make, bank. Don't feel sorry for them. There are lot of loved bands that are broke.

1. Oversaturation. Monoculture used to overplay popular songs until people got sick of them and rejected it.

2. They made the same song over and over again. A lot of their hit songs sound almost indistinguishable from each other and their albums were mostly filler.

3. There was a lot of internet backlash against Chad Koeger because Avril Lavigne. Avril’s relationship with Derek Whibley of Sum 41 was obsessed over by a lot of chronically online weirdos at a time when the internet was still kinda small. Chad was blamed by these weirdos for Avril and Derek breaking up, which spawned a lot of hate for Nickelback which spiraled as the internet grew. The weird chronically online kids of the early-mid 2000’s became the first youtubers and biggest bloggers and early social media influencers of the 2010’s. This, those weird kids ended up with an outsized role as tastemakers in the 2010’s.

4. Tastes changed in the latter half of the 2000’s as generic rock n roll declined in popularity. Radio abandoned guitar driven music entirely, dedicated rock and metal fans largely moved on to heavier music (so Nickelback was seen as “whimpy” by comparison), and the trendy folks were listening to the exploding indie pop and folk scenes that were slowly taking over “alt radio”. The original audience for nickelback had grown out of it, many switching to country music which was also growing in popularity at the time after a relative lull in the early to mid 2000’s. Basically, rock bifurcated into extremes and the casual fans abandoned the extremes for country, hip hop, recession pop, or indie folk.

4. Natural cycles of popularity, cringe, and nostalgia basically cause anything that is cool today to be dated 5 years from now, cringe 10 years from now, viscerally hated 15 years from now, ironically cool 20 years from now, and nostalgic unironically cool 25 years from now.

Nickelback was hated because the recording industry gatekeepers told people to hate them. They weren't a corporate band, they were a small town Canadian band that happened to find a huge fan base by playing straight forward rock music. The last rock band to have a Billboard #1 song about 25 years ago now.

Dude photograph was pretty good actually