The Online Photographer: Long Live Bands! (OT) (Music Notes)
(This is something that I wrote on theonlinephotographer.typepad.com.)
I think it’s both true and false that guitar groups have declined. The difficulty is that it’s hard to compare the music world (or any cultural form) directly with that of 30+ years ago.
Clearly it’s true that fewer of the most popular acts are guitar groups. (Which I’m fine with: if popular music never evolved we wouldn’t have rock music in the first place.)
But it’s also true that music listening is spread much, much more widely these days than it was decades ago. The “long tail” of listened-to musical acts is longer and thicker.
There are plenty of people listening to rock groups that aren’t among the most played music acts in the world in 2024, just as there are many people listening to disco, country, gospel, house, throat singing, or any other genre. “All” music is now accessible in a way it never was when we had to rely on radio stations and vinyl records to hear music, and to hear about it.
I don’t even know how you would quantify the vast changes in musical listening across genres, given the huge technological and cultural changes that have happened this century. But simply comparing the most popular acts doesn’t paint anything like a full picture of the entire music industry, or all music listening or performing.