The Top 4 Music Artists.
That have not released new music in 30 years.
Trying to figure out the complexities of the waning remnants of the music industry history, seems like it will never make sense. I recently watched a video from Rick Beato about this very subject. (I will add the link below in the article). The video got me thinking about how many people listen to music everyday without ever using paid streaming services; and how - what these people listen to, is never calculated into otherwise meaningful or arbitrary statistics.
According to what Rick Beato shows us in the video (below), the top four music artists who are still relevant in their listening numbers are: Nirvana, The Police, The Beatles and Queen.
Now, imagine that your teenage son or daughter is listening to this music, just like you did when you were their age. They are listening to music that was created three, four, five, six decades before they were born. Why are there so many artists from so many years ago, still so relevant to so many generations? Well, I think that these numbers coming from streaming services is only one small facet of a much bigger picture.
The last time I paid anything for any sort of entertainment service was when I had cable TV, about 15 years ago. I have never once paid for any music streaming services. I've never had to. I am a musician, music teacher and collector of music, all the way back to the 1970's. I still have all of my original vinyl records that I purchased when I started collecting them when I was in 7th grade in 1976. I still have cassette tapes that I started purchasing in 1978. I still have most of my CD collection as well.
Mp3?
Since the advent of the home computer in the 1990's, collecting music and having collections of music, took on a whole new meaning, shortly after the invention of the mp3 file. I got online on my first computer in March 1999. It was a used H/P office desktop with a Windows 95 operating system. It had one gigabyte hard drive and 16 megabytes of RAM. By today's standards, it was a dinosaur. Twenty-five years ago, it was all that I needed to enjoy being online with my first computer.
I then learned about something called Napster and I tried it out. I remember downloading old songs I hadn't heard in decades. I had no room on my computer to store these songs, so I transferred them to cassette tape.
Two years later, I got a new computer. It had a lot more hard drive storage and a much bigger RAM. It also had a ROM drive so that I could easily install video games and burn my own CD’s. I then figured out that I could "rip" my CD's into smaller mp3 files and store them on my computer. I burned all of those files onto CD's as a sort of backup in case my computer ever crashed. Well, this computer was a piece of garbage Gateway desktop with the "Millennium Edition" operating system. That highly unstable O.S. crashed on me at least a dozen times in three years. Luckily, I had all of my music backed up on CD's.
I bought another new computer in 2003. This time, I went back to an H/P computer with a much more stable operating system called "Windows XP". I had plenty of room on a much larger hard drive - for me to store tens-of-thousands of mp3's.
Over the years, I have accumulated just over 55,000 mp3's, which is about 354 gigabytes. They are all backed up in at least three different redundant hard drives and on two smartphones. About 95% of my original collection of vinyl, tapes and CD's are also now, mp3 files.
You see, I had the foresight twenty-five years ago, long before YouTube or Apple iTunes or Spotify, or any other music services, to create my own collection - just like I did when I was a kid. The difference between me and people who pay to listen to music nowadays is - I actually did the work. For well over twenty years, I cataloged, I archived, I tagged, I organized everything I had so that it would always be available, no matter what I wanted to listen to.
This all happened way before smartphones and social media. The fact that smartphones now have terabyte capacities built right in them is mind-blowing to me. My Galaxy S22 Ultra has 512 gigabytes of storage on it. That's nearly 500 times larger than my first computer!
I have roughly 40,000 mp3's on my smartphone. I put them there. I copied them over from my computer hard drive. All of my music is on my phone, in the storage. I know that this sounds strange to some people who pay for their streaming services, but the way I see it - I already paid for this music many, many years ago. To continue paying for it is just stupid.
Then I get asked, "What about new music?" I do not listen to new music. Most of it is garbage. Today's music is not a part of my life's' soundtrack. It doesn't mean anything to me. I have no connection whatsoever to today’s music. You gotta ask - why do so many people who pay for streaming music nowadays, want to listen to music that was created so many years ago? Even the younger generations think that most of today's music sucks.
Arbitrary numbers of plays of any one artist, band or group really doesn't reflect all of the music that is being played elsewhere on turntables and home stereos, laptops and smartphones, cassette and CD boomboxes and walkmans.
The point that Rick makes in the video is about the music that has stood the test of time and continues to do so, no matter which generation listens to it. Will Taylor Swift's music stand the test of time? Probably not. She's already in her mid 30's. The generation of people listening to Taylor Swift's music, will have children of their own who will refuse to listen to it because they will want their own music. Sort of like how female pop artists before her, eventually grew older and faded away - she will one become irrelevant in popular music. Hard to believe, huh?
All music is generational. Good music stands the test of time for all generations, no matter how many times songs are played or how they are played. Younger generations enjoy bands like Nirvana, because Kurt Cobain will always be perpetually 27 years old. Nirvana represents the epitome of teenage angst and rebellion. There are no other artists out there today who come even close to what Nirvana did 30+ years ago.
I can think of so many artists that I grew up with who could have/should have just as easily make the list:
Abba, Boston, Def Leppard, Van Halen, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Journey, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Styx, Supertramp, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Doobie Brothers, Metallica, Yes, Rush, Genesis, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, The Doors, U2 and The Who.
Why aren’t these artists, groups and bands just as relevant as the four listed in the video? Maybe they are, but their numbers just aren't as relevant . There doesn't seem to be any real rhyme or reason as to why some music gets played so much by so many people. Maybe some of those bands I mentioned will make the list in the future.
As a lifetime musician and collector of music, it has become abundantly clear to me that just about anything and everything that can be done in music - has already been done. The only differences that still exist are the artists themselves, the lyrics and the singers. Mathematically, anything that can be done in music from chord progressions to melodies to song structures and instruments, has been exhausted to the point of repetition. The only things left to do are repeat, steal, sample, plagiarize and cookie-cut. This is why I couldn't be more apathetic to today's music. Everything new sounds like something I've already heard somewhere else.
As a music teacher, my genuine hope for the future of music is that the art of creating and making music remains. The learning and the practicing of perfecting an instrument and committing to a lifetime of becoming a better musician will always be a tangible, sustainable aspect and quality in all music.