Is rock ‘n’ roll dead? The data suggests it might be
- Thread starter Shaka Zulu
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It's not at all what you said. Let's have a refresher:
Music sales is not a reliable indicator of what people are listening to. I have five words for anyone who says otherwise: Post, hoc, ergo, and propter hoc.
People buy music. Who knows what they do with it afterwords. They might give it as a gift--to someone who never listens to it. It might have been a blind buy where they listened to it once and then it just sat on a shelf or in the bowls of their hard drives collecting dust.
There's also the fact that, these days, people get their music in so many different ways that, point of sales numbers really aren't helpful. Let's be honest, right or wrong, everyone has at least one piece of music he didn't pay for.
The point is, sales are no indication of what is or is not "prevailing."
As far as airplay is concerned, if we limit "airplay" to only mean radio play, then you're totally off the mark. For one thing, all it's an indication of is what advertisers are telling stations to air. It does non imply people are listening to them. You could argue "common sense infers," but again, correlation fallacy.
But I'll humor you anyway. According to this chart, Top 40 makes up a very small percentage of radio stations in the United States. At the top are country and Religious. Are you going to call those "mainstream"? And third is the various collection of adult contemporary. Well the problem with that is "adult contemporary" is a vaguely all-inclusive super-set of genres. So that's not a reliable indicator either.
And that's just the US. I would bet a similar chart of the globe would be even more diverse. Especially, in most of central and eastern Europe and Asia where "pop music" has a vastly different connotation.
And if we take "airplay" to include online sources, then the metrics are so vast and complex that it would be impossible to accurately compile some list of what most people were listening to most of the time. You know, "prevailing."
And therein lies the crux. The issue isn't that the mainstream isn't the mainstream because it's been replaced by something else, it's that mainstream music isn't mainstream music because there's no longer such a thing as mainstream music.
Anyway, I'll just hold onto that apology thankyouverymuch.
It's not on life support, it just doesn't have exclusive support and has to compete against other genres. I bet Rock is more popular than country, it doesn't mean country is dead. There's also still a following for blues and jazz even if they aren't as popular as they once were. We're not talking about Sousa marches here. Quite a bit of people are fans of Rock.
Mister Fandango
Fleet Captain
Is "rock 'n' roll" dead? Yes. It started dying in the 60s, but still shows up from time to time.
Is "rock music" dead? No. It's a style of music that encompasses a massive amount of sub-genres, including rock 'n' roll, hard rock, heavy metal, punk, grunge, techno, ska, and dozens upon dozens of others, and pretty much every other genre of modern music incorporates aspects of it.
So yes, "rock 'n' roll" is dead. Rock, however, isn't going anywhere any time soon.
Is "rock music" dead? No. It's a style of music that encompasses a massive amount of sub-genres, including rock 'n' roll, hard rock, heavy metal, punk, grunge, techno, ska, and dozens upon dozens of others, and pretty much every other genre of modern music incorporates aspects of it.
So yes, "rock 'n' roll" is dead. Rock, however, isn't going anywhere any time soon.
Nice guy met him at a thing, super-knowledgeable about watches - I didn't know he was famous until after we spoke.
Your reaction to dubstep shows how too much exposure to Classic Rot has warped your musical palate.
It's true you don't see a lot of kids listening to the Beatles and Zeppelin (Though I got into them when I was 20).
I'm thinking more of bands such as The National and Arcade Fire. They're not as big as hip hop but they skew heavily toward college age males. And among that it skews toward introverts, but the biggest of those kinds of bands often appear on shows like Saturday Night Live and Stephen Colbert. There are people out there who love that kind of music. I caught Robbie Robertson in an interview on CNN and he said that there was rock music going on today every bit as good as the rock music in his day and he cited The National as an example.
The fans of those bands are out there, just not in Rihanna numbers, and enjoying their music a little more insularly than Rihanna fans. The numbers of that subculture are more in the 6 or low 7 figures, whereas Rihanna's are in 7 or 8 figures. They play at smaller venues, but believe me, the fans are in their 20's, and they are super into it. The National and Arcade Fire are like the Velvet Undergrounds, the Jams and the Joy Divisions of our day.
And just like Community fans, the bands don't make a dime off them.
Kids? I know 40-year olds who listen to Dubstep!
One thing you have to understand about top 100 lists is that they are essentially the favorite 100 songs of the group with the greatest raw numbers, they're not a cross section of what everybody is listening to. If 10% of people loved one genre, but no other genre was loved by more than 10%, those 10% would determine the entire top 100.
The measure of a genre being 'Dead' is that nobody is listening to it. Rock is clearly less popular than hip hop and dance-pop, but those smaller venues it gets played in get crazy.
The measure of a genre being 'Dead' is that nobody is listening to it. Rock is clearly less popular than hip hop and dance-pop, but those smaller venues it gets played in get crazy.
To be fair, when it all started record industry types did used to call the collapse of Rock album sales "The Pearl Jam Effect", the result of having a lot of tech savvy young males for fans.
It's why rock music sales got hit harder at the start of the digital age, although I don't know if that still applies now.
Yes, and Liona Boyd, Julian Bream, Christopher Parkening, Eliot Fisk, The Romeros, and the Australian John Williams all play the guitar. As does Mason ("Classical Gas") Williams.
Regardless of rock (which, with a few exceptions, I try to ignore), I hope we can all agree that disco is dead (and has long-since started to stink).
Saying that rock is dead is kind of like saying classical is dead or jazz is dead. If the barometer for being dead is appearing on top 100 charts then only dance-pop and hip-hop are alive. Because the top 100 has always just been the favorite 100 of the most populous money-spending group, even if the most populous group is well less than half the audience.
There's all kinds of thriving subcultures who just aren't as numerous as the hip hop and dance fans. The indie rock subculture (Which is what I was talking about when I said it skewed toward college males, because right now 'Indie' pretty much just means anybody who writes their own music regardless of what it sounds like) is just one of them. There's also the jam band scene, the heavy metal fans who mob-vote rateyourmusic, classical/jazz fans, the folk scene, the club scene, and that's just in the United States.
There's all kinds of thriving subcultures who just aren't as numerous as the hip hop and dance fans. The indie rock subculture (Which is what I was talking about when I said it skewed toward college males, because right now 'Indie' pretty much just means anybody who writes their own music regardless of what it sounds like) is just one of them. There's also the jam band scene, the heavy metal fans who mob-vote rateyourmusic, classical/jazz fans, the folk scene, the club scene, and that's just in the United States.
It's true you don't see a lot of kids listening to the Beatles and Zeppelin (Though I got into them when I was 20).
I'm thinking more of bands such as The National and Arcade Fire. They're not as big as hip hop but they skew heavily toward college age males. And among that it skews toward introverts, but the biggest of those kinds of bands often appear on shows like Saturday Night Live and Stephen Colbert. There are people out there who love that kind of music. I caught Robbie Robertson in an interview on CNN and he said that there was rock music going on today every bit as good as the rock music in his day and he cited The National as an example.
The fans of those bands are out there, just not in Rihanna numbers, and enjoying their music a little more insularly than Rihanna fans. The numbers of that subculture are more in the 6 or low 7 figures, whereas Rihanna's are in 7 or 8 figures. They play at smaller venues, but believe me, the fans are in their 20s, and they are super into it. The National and Arcade Fire are like the Velvet Undergrounds, the Jams and the Joy Divisions of our day.
And just like Community fans, the bands don't make a dime off them.
The rock bands of today would be more popular, or course, if commercial radio actually took the time and effort to discover and play them. But it doesn't want to do that at all, even though bands like The National and Arcade Fire exist and play rock. Most of the rock stations are too interested in preserving the Classic Rot (I'm sorry, but it's gone beyond Rock to Rot, in that it's made older rock music rotten and stinky due to being overplayed and overexposed) radio format to please Bob & June Baby Boom and their like-minded offspring and less interested in seeking out new rock music like the bands described by you which was mentioned in this recent article and in a past one by the same paper years apart.
This is why, in North America generally, we need to have radio re-regulated, so that companies like Clear Channel can't buy up every radio station around and only program a narrow spectrum of music (we also need to force the government to make radio station ownership more open so that individuals and organizations who give a shit about music and radio are the ones who are the majority of owners and not greedy assholes who buy up a station just to put their stock market windfall profits into-the real reason why most of radio is bland and loaded with advertising and pop music like that of Justin Bieber and Katy Perry and their contemporaries. The story of a young American lady and how she was ultimately stymied in her dream of owning a radio station comes to mind.)
Only when we do this, can rock come back in the public eye.
Some articles on the loss of radio diversity and how it can be brought back:
http://www.gigablast.com/get?q=&c=dmoz3&d=137522913904&cnsp=0
Obviously you've never heard of EDM and the artists that play it, then. Or house, acid house techno, New Beat, etc.?
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Rock isn't dead,rock is still going strong,have a look at the bands that are touring at the moment,bon jovi,motley crue,kiss,the rolling stones just to name a few,cant see these so called bands|singers still around in 20 plus years,a 50 year Justin bieber still around making music at 50-nope,mick jagger yes(he be 100something by there)
I'm sure people thought the same about the "Biebers" of the past. Beebs might be headlining in Vegas in twenty years, playing to an audience of aging Beliebers.
