The Top 10 are determined by music fans: numbers are based on the combined total page views of the top 50 hennemusic rock news stories of the past twelve months.
Rock News Artist Of The Year #07 – MOTLEY CRUE
Rock News Artist Of The Year #08 – METALLICA
Rock News Artist Of The Year #09 – JAMES DURBIN
Rock News Artist Of The Year #10 – PEARL JAM
The 2011 hennemusic Rock News Award winners will be announced on Tuesday, December 20 at hennemusic.com.
Rock News Artist Of The Year #6 – JOURNEY
Journey rolled on in 2011 with a new album and a world tour.
The band has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, largely due to the ongoing success of their 1981 smash, “Don’t Stop Believin’.” The song’s appearance in several high-profile television shows has given it a second life; it re-entered the UK singles charts in 2009 thanks to digital downloads and is now the biggest selling catalog track in iTunes history.
In May, Journey released “Eclipse,” their second album with Arnel Pineda, the singer who hooked up with the band in 2007 after guitarist Neal Schon watched live videos of Arnel with Flipino rock band The Zoo, on YouTube. Pineda is a virtual dead-ringer for the voice of former Journey singer Steve Perry, who sang on the band’s biggest hits.
Schon raved about the new album before its release, telling VH1, “It sounds amazing. I’m in love with the record, which I haven’t said for a long time. I really fought for this record to be the way it is. It’s a rock record. It’s built for the places we’re about to play.”
“We’re playing a lot of big shows – South America and Europe – and we’re going to be touring the whole world on and off for two years,” continued Schon. “So with the addition of Arnel, we’ve become more of an international band which has been really great. We busted all kinds of markets wide open. So I wrote for what I felt we were missing in our show. We've got a lot of hits to play and we have to play those but there's plenty of time to do some new stuff too so we're gonna mix it up."
Journey kicked things off in early June with a short UK tour featuring Foreigner and Styx; following that, they hit North America with Foreigner and Night Ranger for the next three months.
In November, Journey received the Legend Of Live Award at the 2011 Billboard Touring Awards in New York, part of the Billboard Touring Conference.
The award honors groups or individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to live music and the touring business, and acknowledges the recipients' commitment to the art of performing live and reaching fans through the concert experience.
Journey remains a hugely successful touring band, having sold nearly 1 million tickets and averaging more than $600,000 a night at the box office on this year's "Eclipse" tour, according to Billboard Boxscore.
That same month, the band released a new compilation, “Greatest Hits Vol. 2”; the collection features singles and album tracks recorded between 1978 and 1996.
Former singer Perry, whose work is all over the package, actually did some media interviews to help promote the collection, prompting many fans to continue their call for his return to the group, which he left in 1998.
Journey Journey – Don’t Stop Believin’
NBC – Today Show – July 29, 2011
