Michael Manley is a comic book illustrator and a professor at the Delaware College of Art and Design, and something he said recently sticks in my mind. We were talking about movies—specifically, movies whose inspirations had been previous source material—when Star Wars came up. A phenomenon like Star Wars, Manley said, would be an anomaly now: no film in today’s market could have the kind of cultural impact that would allow it to invade so many aspects of our lives, so many corners of our consciousness, all at once, to the point where no child born after its moment is unaware of its significance.

That’s probably not true; movies, because they still share common denominators like theaters, big screens, DVD releases—snacks, even—resonate the same way for a lot of us, the way TV shows do. But Manley’s point could certainly be applied to music, that no band or artist will ever again take over mass culture in one big, fell swoop, the way the Beatles did in the ’60s, and Michael Jackson in the ’80s, and Nirvana in the ’90s. But is this a bad thing?  Not really. What’s lacking in sweeping statements—what the rock critic Robert Christgau defined recently in a PopMatters.com interview as monoculture—is more than made up for in variety. The year 2006 should be remembered as a time when niche tastes won out: not since the mid-1990s has there been so much to choose from, so many genres within genres. The difference between now and then is that now we have more vehicles for discovery—a mediocre band like Arctic Monkeys can break sales records in England based on the popularity of their MySpace page; in 1994, you were special if you owned a Discman. Album sales plummeted, track downloads soared. The music hasn’t changed much, but the ways in which we take it in have, most likely forever.

The closest we have to a shared musical experience right now might be the rapper Jay-Z, who also is the president of Def Jam Records, home to other rappers like Kanye West, Young Jeezy, and Rick Ross. Jay-Z’s movements are watched closely and strategically, and his influence is such that anyone who stands close enough to him usually sees an increase in personal wealth. In 2003 Jay-Z “retired,” which meant he was bored with rap; last month he was scheduled to release a comeback album, Kingdom Come, the pre-hype for which landed him on the covers of Entertainment Weekly and—in what has to be an unprecedented appearance for a hip-hop artist—Life.

Kingdom Come takes its title from the 1996 comic book series about Superman, which finds an aging Man of Steel coming out of retirement to battle a gang of sub-par, corrupt super-people who’ve shrugged off their responsibilities and opt to fight each other instead of saving the world. It’s a fascinating idea, not only because of how today’s hip-hop mirrors Kingdom Come’s storyline, but because few rappers have the foresight to step back and look at where the genre is headed, let alone the nerve to try to redirect it.

Jay-Z isn’t much of a rapper anymore—he doesn’t break new ground and he’s really more of a businessman than anything—and at least two younger emcees, Lil Wayne and T.I., usurped his talent this year. But Jay’s success (and appeal) has always been attributable to marketing rather than skill, the way he was able to brand himself a superstar before becoming one, the way he lets his art parallel the events in his real life.

Marketability was responsible for many of this year’s success stories. It was the reason why the sponging Gnarls Barkley could make an album that wasn’t very good but still sold a lot of copies; why a trend-bucking but wholly average rapper like Lupe Fiasco could score more press than his better Chicago peers. Meanwhile, pop figures sought reinvention: Justin Timberlake is now a young Hugh Hefner; Christina Aguilera is a blonde Billie Holiday.

But what happens when marketing backfires, when the back stories get more notice than the music? This is what happened to the rap duo Clipse and the songwriter Chan Marshall, who goes by the name Cat Power.

After building new momentum with a pair of mixtapes last year, Clipse found themselves at war with their label, Jive, over the release of their long-awaited second album, Hell Hath No Fury, which follows their debut by four years. Commitments were set and then broken, and soon any mention of the group inevitably included a description of their disjointed career. (Ironically, the label pushed back the album’s release date because it felt Clipse were too difficult to market. Hell Hath No Fury was scheduled to see the light of day on Nov. 28.)

For Marshall, a years-long battle with stage fright and alcoholism culminated in hospitalization in January, just prior to the release of her acclaimed album The Greatest. Unable to tour for several months, Marshall reportedly cost her label, Matador, $100,000 in promotion costs.

The Greatest is unassuming and artist-driven, one of many albums this year that found itself on the receiving end of respectable sales and critical gushing but still lost in the crowd. It’s a full, purposeful work, and it wasn’t alone. Others, like the Decemberists’ The Crane Wife or TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain, even had major labels backing their cause. The results hardly differed.

Great as these records are, nothing this year captured widespread attention for too long. Many things are to blame, not the least of which is the music itself. But people who complain about the state of entertainment usually aren’t finding the right things to like. I take solace in a butchered quote: “To the world it may be one record, but some records can be our whole world.”