Somewhere over British Columbia ? What happens to those shrieking callers you hear on the radio after they’ve won the chance to accompany their favorite band on some rock-and-roll safari? The answer might surprise you.

On Oct. 13, a day after Canada’s Nickelback captured the top spot on the Billboard album chart, asap joined the band on a flight across Canada with 82 fans – winners of various radio, Internet and record store contests. The plan was to barnstorm across four time zones with a 22-hour riot of meet-and-greets, mini-concerts and an afterparty to promote “All the Right Reasons.”

In the final of three installments, asap tunnels under the hype and gets to the heart of what makes Nickelback so successful in spite of the haters.

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Nickelback has the No. 1 album on the Billboard chart. If every man, woman and child in the Netherlands bought one of their albums, it still wouldn’t equal the amount of albums already sold. They’re one of the few bands equally at home on classic rock and Top 40 radio stations.

Yet several Web sites are dedicated to exposing their flaws, they’re regularly panned by critics and even some of their biggest influences have dissed them. Why such animosity?

Nickelback's lead singer Chad Kroeger makes his way through a crowd after signing autographs at a music store in Toronto, Ontario. Toronto was one of many stops across Canada for the group's one-day tour.

The band is a victim of its own success. By riding acoustic-tinged ballads (“How You Remind Me,” “Someday”), to the top of the pop charts, Nickelback has mortally wounded its chances of hard-rock credibility, and become synonymous with wuss rock in the minds of casual observers. And their latest radio juggernaut “Photograph” will only bolster the argument by critics that the band relies on a hit-making formula.

Among the band’s catalog, slower songs like these number in the minority. But they’re among the most significant reasons for the band’s chart success. The sentimental “Photograph” propelled the band’s most recent album “All the Right Reasons” to its hot-shot debut.

The dichotomy isn’t lost on guitarist Ryan Peake. The first book of tablature he ever bought was Metallica’s “Master of Puppets.”

“We’re a rock band,” he said. “We get our more melodic songs on the radio and whatnot and they usually become the singles, but man, we started playing rock songs.”

Despite an overwhelming vote of confidence from fans – 17 million records sold and counting – the media will hardly give the band a break. A sample review of their latest album in The New York Times chides: “For hard rock ridiculousness, Nickelback is hard to beat.”

Cyberspace doesn’t offer much refuge, either. A listener struck by the similarities between two of the band’s hit ballads designed a Web site where users can hear the songs play simultaneously separate of his earphones. It’s hard to argue with the results.

Even one of Peake’s heroes, drummer Lars Ulrich of Metallica, lamented in a Boston Globe interview last year that radio has become more conservative and “the Nickelbacks of the world are dominating it.”

But love them or hate them, the boys of Nickelback are very good at what they do. Even detractors have to concede they are master craftsmen of catchy songs. And they’re versatile. “All the Right Reasons” is a rock smorgasbord ranging from softies like “Photograph” to “Side of a Bullet,” a song as heavy as anything you’re likely to hear at Ozzfest.