Data Reveals Which Era Had the Best Music (Spoiler — it wasn’t the 90’s)
At the risk of sounding like a disgruntled boomer, for a long time it seemed to me that popular music is steadily becoming more and more… meh. The most successful artists of the 60’s and 70’s were The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Elvis and Stevie Wonder. What an amazing time that probably was to grow up in! The most successful in the 2000's? Britney Spears, Eminem, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Rihanna. Now I don’t have a lot of patience for musical avant-gardism — I believe that music doesn’t have to be complex to be truly great, and a song with 3 chords can be just as good (and probably better) than a song with 20. And sure some of the songs of those 2000’s artists are actually really good! But still in terms of musical quality — The Beatles vs. Eminem? Led Zeppelin vs. Justin Bieber? I don’t think you need to be a high minded musical snob to agree that there is still a huge chasm between their songs, even if you liked Sorry (It was a cute song!) and Toxic (Loved it!) as much as I did.
Staying power of songs
So I wanted to do a little analysis to see if I can prove this intuition. But how do you even begin to measure such an abstract thing as musical greatness? What makes a song timeless? My solution in this post is to look at how popular a song is, many years after it…
