Last Friday saw some decent new album releases and I enjoyed giving several of them a listen, as always. So far, I’m not sure if any of them will make it into my rotation long-term. The top of the heap was April March’s new album In Cinerama, a fascinating pop-rock record that may get its own review before long, but one I feel needs a couple more listens to fully unravel. In the meantime, here’s a topic I’ve been pondering since late last year.
Last year’s Billboard “Top 200 Albums of 2021” list has been nagging at me. Unlike the countless other critic and music writer end-of-year lists I was perusing at the time, the Billboard list is based solely on popularity, not any type of critical assessment. One writer who presented an analysis of the list noted that it contained exactly zero new rock albums; everything on the list that was released in 2021 fit into the pop, rap, or country genres, or some mishmash of the three. There were rock albums on the list, just none that had been released last year. The highest charting rock album of 2021 was forty years old, for crying out loud – Queen’s Greatest Hits at #23. The most recent rock album still hanging out on the list was 2020’s Power Up by AC/DC at #174 (speeding downward, with a bullet), and from there you had to go back in time to 2013 to find the next most current one, Arctic Monkeys’ AM at #120. The AC/DC, Arctic Monkeys, and Metallica’s Metallica (aka the Black Album) were the only three rock albums on the list that weren’t greatest hits collections. Apparently, folks who still listen to rock music, especially via streaming, are embracing it in a decidedly nostalgic, rather than exploratory, way.
Since Billboard’s 2021 list was published there’s been a great deal of eulogizing over the corpse of rock music, with writers either questioning if the genre is dead as a commercial entity or stating with certainty that it is. Rock music made an impressive showing on the critic’s end-of-year lists, there was a lot of great new music released in the genre last year, but apparently the vast music-consuming mass of humanity wasn’t listening. That type of deathbed-sitting would have seemed outrageous and impossible back in the 1970s, the decade when my music tastes exploded. The most popular music was mostly rock back then. Even in that era, when there was some spectacular pop music on the radio, including soul, funk, and R&B crossovers, it was generally understood that bands like Zeppelin, the Stones, Black Sabbath, Bad Company, Kiss, Queen, Creedence, and Deep Purple defined the cultural and commercial zeitgeist. You could easily defend the lighter weight pop hits as being great music, because they were, but there was a general consensus that pop was the little brother or sister to real rock music, and it would always be that way.
I have to question how Billboard compiles its charts these days and wonder if that has something to do with the shift to pop, rap, and country over rock music. You don’t need me to tell you that how the average music fan receives and listens to their favorite tunes has changed radically in the streaming era. Billboard’s earliest charts were based solely on the sale of sheet music around the country. People played music in their homes before recordings and radios became ubiquitous, so popularity was determined by how many people wanted to plunk out, say, “(I’m Just Wild About) Animal Crackers” (1926) on the piano in the parlor. Once radios became the TV sets of their day, and records became a viable commercial product, airplay, record sales, and the favorites on the jukeboxes that started to spring up everywhere were tallied and added to sheet music as a way of determining the public’s musical tastes. The calculations shifted entirely to record sales as the home stereo industry took off in the 1970s (jukebox plays hung in there as a popularity indicator for surprisingly long time, though). And that’s the way it stayed, on through the CD era, until 2013, when YouTube streams were added to the equation. Then came Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc. until the almighty algorithm rose up like Skynet and record labels started to tell music consumers what they liked, instead of the other way around.
One major flaw in that shift is that the algorithms that provide current music lovers with their most-used path to finding new music – “if you liked Artist A, you’ll love Artist B” – don’t have any way to reflect whether or not the listener actually liked the suggestion. Even if you get a recommendation, based on your repeated plays of a new Taylor Swift single, that makes you want to stomp on your phone or laptop and flush it down the toilet, the algorithm will only record that you accepted the recommendation and, whether you wanted to or not, boosted its popularity. Sure, there are ways to give the songs you’re given a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to indicate whether or not you liked them, but research shows that most listeners don’t use that function and giving a thumbs down only serves to tailor your personal streaming device slightly, not pull popular support from a tune you listened to but hated.
What does all that have to do with the commercial decline of rock music? In a smaller sense, the music that’s presented to you via the suggestion algorithms reflects your personal tastes, obviously. But pull up any major streaming service and you’ll find that there’s something else going on. The stuff that rises to the top of the display, before you drill down to your favorite music, is the music that’s most popular over the whole streaming platform. When I open up my Qobuz app, for example, you’d never guess what I’ve been streaming recently by looking at what’s on the front page. I have to choose to go past the most popular pop/rap/country hits to find what I want to hear. I’m a music digger, since the 1970s I’ve always looked beyond the charts to discover new artists and albums. That sort of archeology is a part of the hobby I truly love, but I’m aware of how that makes me an outlier in the age of music streaming. The most common way for listeners to accumulate new and favorite music these days is to listen to what’s being fed to them as “suggestions” and, if something comes up they think they want to hear again, "favorite" the song and/or throw it on a self-created playlist. The end result is a radio station-like collection of single songs that reflect what the listener likes out of the sea of similar-sounding music that everybody else likes. It still feels personal, it still makes the music fan feel unique because their list isn’t exactly like anyone else’s, but in reality, it’s not. What they end up listening to is more passively filtered than actively discovered.
The streaming algorithm mechanics give rock music a very short end of the stick. Rock music fans (and their ideological cousins, jazz fans), according to the stats, are hanging on to physical formats more than the measurably younger streaming audience. The end result is the suggestion platforms of the major streaming services are heavily weighted toward what’s popular with fans of an age that grew up without a connection to any form of physical media, or the concept of “albums” in general. Some will point to the surge in popularity of vinyl albums among younger fans as a counterargument to that idea but based on the actual numbers of music streamed vs. LPs sold, vinyl is still just a small drop in the music-consumption bucket, regardless of what age group we’re talking about. The youngest music fans among us stream, period, have only streamed, and will likely continue to stream, at least until something unforeseen comes along to take its place. And they will likely continue to be underexposed to the rock genre, as the new music algorithms have shifted away from it (nostalgia has no place in the calculations.) I would expect it to take a very long time to shift back, if it ever does.
Like everything else in the history of nearly any subject you care to name, this situation isn’t new. The “rock is dead” declarations have been heard before. Before the punk scene fired up in the late 70s, the general thinking was that the dominance of disco, together with a rock genre that seemed to be self-calcifying into boring “classic rock” repetitiveness, even before that format name existed, were finally crumbling the aging infrastructure of bass, drums, and loud electric guitars. Punk was ultimately a failed genre commercially, but success was still measured in the movement of physical units at that point, and record companies tripped over themselves to sign any band with a pulse who could tap into the energy of the punks but make more commercial-sounding records. And it worked, lots of the so-called “post punk” and “new wave” records that were unleashed in the 1980s performed extremely well in the marketplace and opened doors for another generation of rock bands around the world. Similarly, as post-punk seemed to disappear and new wave morphed into decidedly more pop-oriented electronic dance music in the later 80s, guitar-driven rock was, once again, declared dead or dying by a majority of observers. But, again, the fact that there were physical units to be moved led to a revival. It turned out that the post-punkers hadn’t packed up and called it a day, they were simply laying low until Nirvana overtook the airwaves (I’m looking at you, MTV) with Nevermind in 1991. The “grunge” bands revitalized the genre one more time, and seemingly every musician with a Seattle zip code got a record contract if they wrote and played heavy electric rock music. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden moved huge numbers of CDs, and rock music, in the guise of grunge, swept the world for another, gloriously loud, moment.
The key difference today is that record labels are looking elsewhere to define success. The kind of numbers they’re using to measure "sales" are digital, ephemeral (literally a “cloud”), and harder to monetize without physical products leading the way. Even back in the day, my day, young music fans were the main drivers of the popularity of lighter, poppier music. When they reached their teens, they were expected to “graduate” to heavier, more exploratory, rock music. I’m not seeing a way for that shift to happen anymore, since streaming itself is being driven primarily by young listeners who will have fewer opportunities to be exposed to genres they’re not listening to already. Their older siblings (and parents) are far less likely to clue them in, and radio has become so segregated it requires searching, without the assistance of an algorithm, to explore beyond what they already like. And that’s assuming there’s some spark that motivates them to explore in the first place.
But I don’t want to end this piece on such a downer conclusion for rock music fans. Despite its weakening grip on the commercial music industry’s popularity charts, rock music is still alive and well if you’re interested. Some marvelous rock albums were released in 2021, despite what Billboard seemed to be telling us. The War on Drugs’ I Don’t Live Here Anymore is a great example of tuneful, engaging rock music, possibly my favorite record in any genre last year. Greta Van Fleet and Dirty Honey released albums that immediately called to mind the arena-rock glory days of Zeppelin, Aerosmith, and the Black Crowes, among others. Atlanta’s Blackberry Smoke released You Hear Georgia, which filled the hole left by the absence of southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers very nicely. ZZ Top guitarist and vocalist Billy Gibbons, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and Foo Fighters kept on doing what they do in 2021, representing the old guard and setting a very high bar for rock music as a whole. Even the eternal Cheap Trick, a hard-working rock band since their first LP in 1977, released the excellent In Another World in 2021 to great reviews and decent, if not game-changing, sales. The big beat definitely goes on. Old rock fans haven’t all died off yet, and new ones are being added every day. But the extremely talented young and old artists who are continuing to make rock music need to be heard to survive, now more than ever. If you loved rocking out back in the day, riding around in your best friend’s car, blasting BTO’s Not Fragile or Boston's debut on the 8-track player, don’t believe the algorithms – your tribe’s music is still being made, and still out there waiting for you. All you have to do to find it is get out from under Skynet’s thumb once in a while. The best advice I can end this post with is that those same algorithms streaming platforms and record labels use to herd listeners to music they want you to like can be easily used for exploration. It only takes a couple more keyboard strokes or finger swipes.
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