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Fractional Fairytale: The dream of owning a vacation home can come ...

In the last 10 years, buying a second home has become the epitome of the American dream. Homeownership may have marked entry into the promised land, but it was the vacation property that fueled the most ecstatic visions: wineries, beach houses, pieds-à-terre and mountain cabins. These were not places where people lived, worked and paid bills, but where life unfolded according to the seasons, with the ebb and flow of recreation, family reunions and private retreats.

As the real estate boom crested, the second-home market swelled as well, even helping to stem falling prices when the boom busted. In 2005, second-home sales rose more than twice as fast as all new single-family-home sales and nearly four times faster than all resale homes, according to the National Association of Realtors.

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Sales Can't Buy Love for Some Top Bands

Young people who "are introduced to these bands on the radio, they don't have a lot of baggage," Brackett said. "A lot of kids don't care if an act, you know, kind of took their guitar sound from some other band."

Post-grunge outfits like Nickelback and Hinder continue to be popular — or wreak havoc, whatever your opinion — in part because they appeal to the estrogen set, said Craig Marks, editor in chief of Blender magazine. A "slightly hipper band" will sell more albums to guys than girls, he said.

"They're selling a lot of records to very casual music fans who don't buy a lot of CDs," Marks said. "When you're selling 5 million albums like Nickelback or 2 1/2 million like Hinder, and especially when you're making your mark with big ballads that are kind of wedding songs, then you're selling records to both males and females.