I’ve been listening to Rock for as long as I can remember. Pink Floyd, The Cure, and The Smiths were always on repeat in the car ride to school with my dad when I was younger, and they’re still some of my favorites today.
I’ve noticed, however, that whenever I want to find great, newer rock artists, I have to look, and I mean really, look. I’ve certainly found a few I love: Current Joys is one of my favorite artists, Ignant Benches is making incredibly fun rock, etc. Clearly, these bands and artists exist, but it seems to be that rock music is much less accessible today than it was a few decades ago. I mean, if you went to a record store in the 80s and picked out two or three records, I’m pretty certain one would have been a rock album. People have been saying rock is dying for decades now, so it didn’t come as a surprise to me that rock music is harder to come by now. Regardless, I wanted to really see if the data supports this widespread belief. How can a genre that dominated music so much just die out so quickly?
In search of answers, I turned to data provided by Spotify. Note: if you would like to skip the walkthrough of my process and go straight to the findings, scroll until you see a graph.
Instead of using the Spotify API directly, I chose to use this dataset for my analysis as it provided a ton of relevant information and covered music from 1922 to 2021, allowing me to track the progression of rock’s popularity throughout the years. My first step — and a very important one at that — was to define what popularity meant.
In my first attempt, I went off Spotify’s popularity index, which I thought would represent how popular a Song is/was. I soon realized, however, that the popularity index takes is determined by how many times a song has been played, with more recent plays being weighted more than older plays. This was a problem. The fact that Sonic Youth isn’t played so much anymore doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t popular when they were still active. So, I had to figure out a different way to measure popularity. I finally decided to do so by looking at what percentage of songs released in a given year were rock songs (I ignored songs with a Spotify popularity index of less than 10, as I decided that songs had to be at least somewhat relevant to be included in an analysis for popularity).
With popularity defined, I identified the main information I needed for each song in the dataset: the release year and the genre. Looking through the tracks dataset, I noticed that the information provided about each song didn’t include the song’s genre, meaning I couldn’t directly figure out which songs were rock songs. To work around this, I instead looked at the artists’ dataset first, as it provided a list of genres each artist was associated with. Then, I wrote a program to go through each artist in the dataset, looking for any artists who made any form of rock music (Croatian Rock, Metal, Post-Punk, etc). I compiled all these rock-associated artists into a list. Given the diversity of genres I accepted, this list had artists ranging from La Cofradia De La Flor Solar (an Argentinian artist from the 70s I’d never heard of) to Snail Mail (a newer indie rock artist who I think is great) to The Beatles.
Now that I had a list of rock artists from the past nearly-100 years, I went back to the tracks dataset. Again, I wrote a program to look at each song. Since it wasn’t possible to filter for songs that listed its genre as rock, I instead looked at the song’s artists. If any of the artists who were credited with the song were part of my list of rock artists, I’d increment values in a dictionary that tracked, for each year, the number of rock songs and total songs released by 1.
On the other hand, if a song wasn’t written by any artists who were part of the list of rock artists, I’d only increment that year’s total song count by 1. After all this, I now had information about how many rock songs were released each year from 1922–2021 and also how many songs were released in total each year. Thus, I was able to calculate the percentage of rock songs in relation to total songs for each year. Here are the findings.
As seen in the graph, rock didn’t really exist pre-1950s, which makes sense since it wasn’t really invented until the 50s (at least, a song wouldn’t have been labeled as rock). For years pre-1950 that seem to have a non-trivial percentage of rock songs, it may just be that Spotify has gone back to label these older songs themselves for they deem the song to resemble rock (after all, the fact that rock was invented in the 50s doesn’t mean elements that characterize rock weren’t present in music pre-50s). It is clear that rock had its best years in the 70s-90s. This isn’t so surprising, as can be seen through the sheer number of quality rock bands during that period: Queen, Ramones, The Clash, Dire Straits, my favorites The Smiths and The Cure, and so many more.
We see, though, that rock’s popularity starts to decline past the 90s. It doesn’t decrease incredibly quickly, as a rock acts like Nirvana were still very much at the forefront of music. But, rock wasn’t as dominant as it used to be in the decades prior. It also didn’t do rock any favors that hip-hop was rapidly gaining in popularity in the 90s. With the “legendary rock bands” fading from the spotlight at the turn of the century, we start to really see a rapid decline. Perhaps The Strokes were able to slow that downfall in the early-2000s, but they couldn’t stop it completely. Since then, it’s clear rock has continued to fade from the mainstream, with under 5% of songs in 2020 and 2021 being classified as some form of rock.
Despite this, I have hope for rock music; I believe it can and will make a comeback soon. In fact, I think it’s happening now. Olivia Rodrigo, who has been all the talk in the music world recently, just released “good 4 u” and it sounds as though it was taken straight from a Paramore album. The Wallows continue to be loved by many teens and young adults. Beabadoobee has been releasing incredibly fun rock songs for the past few years now, and she’s only getting more popular by the day. Psych-rock acts like Mac DeMarco and Tame Impala have become adored by many, and in the case of Tame Impala, have become global superstars and are set to headline some of music’s biggest events.
Even older rock bands like Fleetwood Mac have been put back into the spotlight (thanks TikTok), and The Strokes seem to be making a big comeback with their latest album, The New Abnormal, winning “Best Rock Album of the Year” at the 2021 Grammys. They’re also set to headline Outside Lands 2021 and Primavera Sound 2022, so clearly they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
This isn’t to say rock is back. I think it’ll certainly take time to overthrow hip-hop and other more dominant genres, but I believe rock is on the right track to make a comeback. After all, great genres can’t just die.
