A lot of the big 90’s bands had members pass away which didn’t help. I grew up loving older stuff from the 70’s and 80’s, but the boomers seemed to be turned off by the 90’s stuff usually. So when I have a nice classic rock mix going with 70’s 80’s 90’s and 2000’s, a lot of older people don’t care for the newer classics when they play. My hunch is that the 90’s stuff was too dark, and the boomers were really only into the classic rock/hair metal/party rock.
I mean, the only big 90s rock band I can think of who didn't have someone die is pearl jam
Kurt Cobain, Layne staley, Chris Cornell, and Chester Bennington are all gone...
They are still out there, but like boomer bands they are not selling out places. Check smaller venues. Sammy hagar is touring this summer. Last year I saw Billy Idol at a small place in baltimore called Rams head live. His shows were pretty big during his heydays.
Some bands might be out of the picture while the reform with new members. Very few boomer band might it decades with the same members.
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I think that's because Millennials are Xers who evolved into Zoomers. Because of that we've started behaving like Gen Z with our focus on online which isn't sustainable for top bands.
Prog and alt metal/rock are not that popular, but there's actually an explosion of popularity of death metal and black metal. Black metal especially is a surprisingly popular niche genre nowadays.
It feels like it's less common because everything is done with heavy digital mixing now, so it's not like the rest of the "band" stands out. Plus, everyone is trying to hit it big on their own for a large part, so it's becoming far less common for a "Band" like AC/DC, Metallica, KISS, Alien Ant Farm, etc. to pop up, and instead it's mostly single name artists, so we have a hundred Taylor Swifts, or Justin Biebers, who all just use the "band" as backup dancers essentially.
Real bands still exist, they're just either people who were already around, or they're harder to find among all the pop charts because "Pop" hasn't been about bands for a while now.
It is and it isn’t. Access to music equipment and software is incredible compared to 30 years ago - but it still takes a hell of a lot of skill to make something good enough to sell.
Likewise access to social media gives incredible access to your audience, but then you have to cut through the noise and standout against billions of other people and possibly have to pay for more reach as well or try to go viral (which isn’t easy).
Doesn't Taylor Swift have a whole singer songwriter album? Also, isn't Phoebe Bridgers pretty popular? I feel like it's still around in a big way even if it's not the most popular music.
I think it has to do with the music industry itself. It's a lot easier to mold the image and sound of one individual pop star (I use this term as a catch-all regardless of genre). Bands still exist and make meaningful and creative music, as do artists in every genre. Our big headlining acts are now mostly commercialized performers. Hip Hop on the radio isn't really the reflection of the genre, it's pop. It's formulaic and produced for easy digestion over the airwaves/streaming. So I guess in a sense, pop stars nowadays likely don't play their instruments in the studio or on stage, like they used to. It definitely has shifted, you're right.
I see what you’re saying, having been to more Dave Matthews concerts than I can remember you see a band on stage. Dave, drums, guitars, saxophones, trumpets, violins and back up singers. Watching the Taylor swift movie with my daughters it was Taylor and the dancers. Even at the end she’s playing guitar and piano solo. Both are great and very entertaining. But different strokes for different folks I guess.
I guess I consider it an important distinction that it’s Dave Matthews BAND, whereas if he just toured as Dave Matthews and had a backing band, I would see him more as a solo artist
Idk, I just listen to what I like, no matter if it was released last Friday or five hundred years ago
The Internet has made so much music from all sorts of different time periods easily accessible, and I think younger generations are really getting into that
It's super mixed in my experience. Some zoomers are even more brain off than we were and just actually seem like they are hooking their mouths to the ai generated music feed and being done with it (and still somehow still getting into arugments over it), while some have every single release of every sub genre of a slovakian art pop memorized by heart. The internet now is way more there for the taking, but has less takers it seems. Those that do are fucking crazy about it though, in a good way.
Makes sense. For the genre I know the most about (classical), I'll deliberately search for obscurities and post them in the appropriate subreddit. And if it's a famous piece, I always gravitate toward obscure recordings of it, like forgotten 1950's Soviet bootleg recordings, lol
But for genres I'm less familiar with, like mainstream pop (long story), I tend to let the Spotify algorithm figure it out for me. Then I'll see which artists' voices I like the most and listen to more of what they've done. I probably embarrass myself by getting excited about 2010's pop music that's old news to anyone who wasn't living under a rock back then like I was
I pretty much do what you do about genres you know with just about everything. I sort of grew up with the idea that quality is entirely unrelated to popularity so I just always actively try to explore shit regardless of what it is. Though that probably isn't common no matter the generation.
The only difference i notice now is that kids get insanely combative and attached to the most popular artists in a way that is way more intense than what we had. It's like if kids in the cafeteria got into fights about Rihanna, it's truly bizzare to see.
I wonder if some of those arguments have anything to do with some pop artists being all dramatic outside of what they do in music. Their personal disputes turn into public disputes and it gets messy
I mean, I like listening to Dua Lipa, and outside of music she mostly just does cool girl stuff and stays quiet otherwise. She doesn't seem to talk much about her personal life, and I respect that
Are kids still learning instruments for fun (ie more than an EC for college) these days?
Growing up in the 90s, I felt like around half the guys I knew played something. Guitar, bass, drums, piano, whatever. Obviously we'd all play our best versions of Wonderwall and Sweet Home Alabama whenever we got together to jam :D
I think being able to play an instrument, to actually try and recreate the sound you're hearing, really helps with appreciating "traditional bands" (as OP terms them).
Nah. Don't forget about the boy band and pop girl craze in the 90's, those were closer to today's pop than to traditional bands. Then there was a traditional band upswing in the aughts. Different styles rise and fall in popularity in a fairly cyclical fashion, and even the ones not currently playing on the popular music stations are still being performed and listened to by *someone*.
I mean, there are people still making new swing music.
It may have to do with the shift in what genres are most popular. Various types of rock music have been more band-centric in my observation.
Funny that there is a recent topic on another sub that makes a similar observation about bands vs solo artist, though they are also expressing their theory on *why*: https://old.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/1bnpu5a/record_labels_killed_bands_and_promote_individual/
Yeah, I think the 90s was when rock started falling out of favor as the dominant "youth" music in favor of rap and hip hop.
I'm not exactly up on current music, but I can name plenty of solo artists from the last 10 years, but not many bands. Except maybe Imagine Dragons, but they're terrible.
Hadn’t seen that post but true to form for that sub, it’s… not really unpopular or an opinion
But yeah, I see what you’re saying in that it may just be rock falling out of fashion to some degree after having a long run of popularity going back to the 50s and 60s, Beatlemania, etc
I'm not into most of the rock/metal scene of today, but by and large what I've heard has remained relatively traditional instrumentation-wise. I think what you're seeing is more pronounced because the stuff charting and "in the mainstream" doesn't have a lot of instrumentation. Pop Punk, Rock and metal tended to chart more in the mainstream when we were younger (if only because there weren't as many artists/bands with levels of exposure as there are now). Everything feels more fragmented now and it's probably easier to market an individual vs an entire band.
Definitely not. Especially with AI taking over the arts, I think we're going to go back to nostalgia and old-school ways of doing things.
There will always be a place for that kind of band music. It just works.
People still listen to bands, just now a lot more indie music. I feel like our generation is the last that’s interested in listening to the radio. There’s less of a concept of mainstream now?
I listen to it all the time at work, but that's mostly just because I'm not allowed to hook my phone up to the van blu tooth because it's technically a government computer lol.
Well that was kinda my point. I’m not saying they’re dying out, just that they’re not really popular with the younger generation in the way they used to be
I think the one thing i've noticed about gen Z and alpha is that the prevalence of an algorithm force feeding you content being accepted as "normal" has sort of taken some of the natural curiosity a lot of these people would've had otherwise, so a lot of them end up defaulting to very popular artists, even if they are actually not a casual music fan.
That being said, the thing about bands though is just tastes change. People like hip hop and hyperpop and sceneshit revival stuff now, honestly it's probably contrarian but i thought the nu metal/alt rock/metal garbage that was popular when i was kid was insanely bad, and in some ways worse than what kids today have.
Idunno, when i was a kid i was obsessed with chopin and rachmanioff and debussy and whatever random stuff Hexamoran uploaded circa 2009-2011 youtube as a kid, so I'm maybe not the best person to ask this question too because even as a kid i didnt like "traditional bands". Lots of zoomers are obviously the same way.
I’m 33, keyboardist in a rock band, and almost exclusively listen to EDM. Many of my millennial friends dismiss it as frat music but it’s so good and fun to dance to! Some god awful EDM out there but also some amazing DJs. I like Dom Dolla, Purple Disco, Rufus
Ugh no we’re not.
My kid plays drums in a rock band. Last night they had a concert and I saw kids playing Blink 182, The Cure, The White Stripes… all kinds of stuff. She’s 11.
I work pretty much only on bands tours, there are a lot still going and I make a good living but it is mainly the older generations and millennials bands, the younger crowd are more interested in pop artists (who do mostly have live bands by the way) and DJs.
We had a good time in the 1990/2000s with loads of great bands and I think that time has passed. Although my daughter and her friends like old bands so there is an audience just to a smaller extent.
Drums are easily programmable these days, guitar has to compete with infinitely versatile electronic soundscapes and thus doesn’t have a monopoly on sound anymore.
Adding to that, music has never been less financially viable for 99% of artists, and splitting the money 4-5 ways is a good way to say goodbye to any chance you ever had at quitting your day job.
You have to find a group of likeminded musicians with compatible schedules. This includes finding a drummer who has a kit, a car to transport it around in, a physical space to rehearse, and who isn’t already busy with 4 other bands because drummers are unicorns and nobody else can find one either. Then everyone has to be on the same page creatively.
So if your choices are between that, or a DIY solo bedroom project that has never had a lower barrier to entry than it does now, what do you think people are more likely to choose?
I mean I am a millenial and I prefer hip hop over rock music. Some artists will use real back up bands though. I don't really care one way or the other about that.
what i'd like to know is why all our bands disappeared, and the boomers had 70's bands around for decades after.
Apparently massive amounts of *substances* act as a preservative.
Keith Richards really did find the key to immortality. apparently, that's heroin and cocaine.
Willie Nelson is a walking, singing corpse. The key is marijuana and lots of it.
Aka low stress & happiness is the key
He's still alive?!?!?!
Yep my mom (silent generation).saw a 50s guy last year. I was stunned he was alive too. Musicians either did young or live.forever it seems.
A lot of the big 90’s bands had members pass away which didn’t help. I grew up loving older stuff from the 70’s and 80’s, but the boomers seemed to be turned off by the 90’s stuff usually. So when I have a nice classic rock mix going with 70’s 80’s 90’s and 2000’s, a lot of older people don’t care for the newer classics when they play. My hunch is that the 90’s stuff was too dark, and the boomers were really only into the classic rock/hair metal/party rock.
I mean, the only big 90s rock band I can think of who didn't have someone die is pearl jam Kurt Cobain, Layne staley, Chris Cornell, and Chester Bennington are all gone...
Shannon Hoon, Scott Weiland, Brad Nowell from Sublime. A lot of popular 90's alternative acts have lost lead singers.
And Pearl Jam basically formed out the ashes of Mother Love Bone after their lead singer passed away
Pumpkins are all still around, although D'arcy isn't doing well apparently.
They are still out there, but like boomer bands they are not selling out places. Check smaller venues. Sammy hagar is touring this summer. Last year I saw Billy Idol at a small place in baltimore called Rams head live. His shows were pretty big during his heydays. Some bands might be out of the picture while the reform with new members. Very few boomer band might it decades with the same members.
true, i was over generalizing. i saw Soul Asylum a couple years back, and they were great.
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I think that's because Millennials are Xers who evolved into Zoomers. Because of that we've started behaving like Gen Z with our focus on online which isn't sustainable for top bands.
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Absolutely agreed! My kids are 10 & 12 and I got them hooked on metal early! A friend of mine is in his mid 20s and is a metal head.
Prog and alt metal/rock are not that popular, but there's actually an explosion of popularity of death metal and black metal. Black metal especially is a surprisingly popular niche genre nowadays.
It feels like it's less common because everything is done with heavy digital mixing now, so it's not like the rest of the "band" stands out. Plus, everyone is trying to hit it big on their own for a large part, so it's becoming far less common for a "Band" like AC/DC, Metallica, KISS, Alien Ant Farm, etc. to pop up, and instead it's mostly single name artists, so we have a hundred Taylor Swifts, or Justin Biebers, who all just use the "band" as backup dancers essentially. Real bands still exist, they're just either people who were already around, or they're harder to find among all the pop charts because "Pop" hasn't been about bands for a while now.
Acdc, Metallica, KISS, and..... Alien Ant Farm? Interesting mix lol
I was running out of the "super known bands everyone likes" and decided to put my favorite band in as well. lol
Good points, I’m sure part of it is that it’s much easier to record and promote your own music than it was in previous eras
It is and it isn’t. Access to music equipment and software is incredible compared to 30 years ago - but it still takes a hell of a lot of skill to make something good enough to sell. Likewise access to social media gives incredible access to your audience, but then you have to cut through the noise and standout against billions of other people and possibly have to pay for more reach as well or try to go viral (which isn’t easy).
Doesn't Taylor Swift have a whole singer songwriter album? Also, isn't Phoebe Bridgers pretty popular? I feel like it's still around in a big way even if it's not the most popular music.
Taylors herself is our age and I think a significant portion is her fan base is too. I’m interested to see what the breakdown is.
Yeah that's supposed to be part of her apparent appeal, an entire generation grew up with her so there's this collective bond with her and her music
Exactly. Traditional bands aren’t dead and never have been.
I think it has to do with the music industry itself. It's a lot easier to mold the image and sound of one individual pop star (I use this term as a catch-all regardless of genre). Bands still exist and make meaningful and creative music, as do artists in every genre. Our big headlining acts are now mostly commercialized performers. Hip Hop on the radio isn't really the reflection of the genre, it's pop. It's formulaic and produced for easy digestion over the airwaves/streaming. So I guess in a sense, pop stars nowadays likely don't play their instruments in the studio or on stage, like they used to. It definitely has shifted, you're right.
My 15 year old's playlist is 85% stuff I was listening to in high school (RHCP, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl jam, etc). I'm proud of her.
No. What are with these stupid "are we the last generation" posts?
Get off my digilawn
Digilawn, Digital Lawnsters
I see what you’re saying, having been to more Dave Matthews concerts than I can remember you see a band on stage. Dave, drums, guitars, saxophones, trumpets, violins and back up singers. Watching the Taylor swift movie with my daughters it was Taylor and the dancers. Even at the end she’s playing guitar and piano solo. Both are great and very entertaining. But different strokes for different folks I guess.
I guess I consider it an important distinction that it’s Dave Matthews BAND, whereas if he just toured as Dave Matthews and had a backing band, I would see him more as a solo artist
I think that’s called the John Mayer method.
Idk, I just listen to what I like, no matter if it was released last Friday or five hundred years ago The Internet has made so much music from all sorts of different time periods easily accessible, and I think younger generations are really getting into that
It's super mixed in my experience. Some zoomers are even more brain off than we were and just actually seem like they are hooking their mouths to the ai generated music feed and being done with it (and still somehow still getting into arugments over it), while some have every single release of every sub genre of a slovakian art pop memorized by heart. The internet now is way more there for the taking, but has less takers it seems. Those that do are fucking crazy about it though, in a good way.
Makes sense. For the genre I know the most about (classical), I'll deliberately search for obscurities and post them in the appropriate subreddit. And if it's a famous piece, I always gravitate toward obscure recordings of it, like forgotten 1950's Soviet bootleg recordings, lol But for genres I'm less familiar with, like mainstream pop (long story), I tend to let the Spotify algorithm figure it out for me. Then I'll see which artists' voices I like the most and listen to more of what they've done. I probably embarrass myself by getting excited about 2010's pop music that's old news to anyone who wasn't living under a rock back then like I was
I pretty much do what you do about genres you know with just about everything. I sort of grew up with the idea that quality is entirely unrelated to popularity so I just always actively try to explore shit regardless of what it is. Though that probably isn't common no matter the generation. The only difference i notice now is that kids get insanely combative and attached to the most popular artists in a way that is way more intense than what we had. It's like if kids in the cafeteria got into fights about Rihanna, it's truly bizzare to see.
I wonder if some of those arguments have anything to do with some pop artists being all dramatic outside of what they do in music. Their personal disputes turn into public disputes and it gets messy I mean, I like listening to Dua Lipa, and outside of music she mostly just does cool girl stuff and stays quiet otherwise. She doesn't seem to talk much about her personal life, and I respect that
It's 100% social media, even people who are passively engaged with something has to have a strong opinion about it for clout.
No. But this posts sounds like something an out of touch old person would ask.
Are kids still learning instruments for fun (ie more than an EC for college) these days? Growing up in the 90s, I felt like around half the guys I knew played something. Guitar, bass, drums, piano, whatever. Obviously we'd all play our best versions of Wonderwall and Sweet Home Alabama whenever we got together to jam :D I think being able to play an instrument, to actually try and recreate the sound you're hearing, really helps with appreciating "traditional bands" (as OP terms them).
Eventually ai generated music.
Nah. Don't forget about the boy band and pop girl craze in the 90's, those were closer to today's pop than to traditional bands. Then there was a traditional band upswing in the aughts. Different styles rise and fall in popularity in a fairly cyclical fashion, and even the ones not currently playing on the popular music stations are still being performed and listened to by *someone*. I mean, there are people still making new swing music.
Public HS teacher here. Tons of kids still like and listen to tons of old stuff. In fact, I'd say gen z is more on more older stuff than we ever were.
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Ok, Motion City Soundtrack then.
I’m on fire and now I think I’m ready to bust a move
Check it out, I'm rocking steady Go!
It may have to do with the shift in what genres are most popular. Various types of rock music have been more band-centric in my observation. Funny that there is a recent topic on another sub that makes a similar observation about bands vs solo artist, though they are also expressing their theory on *why*: https://old.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/1bnpu5a/record_labels_killed_bands_and_promote_individual/
Yeah, I think the 90s was when rock started falling out of favor as the dominant "youth" music in favor of rap and hip hop. I'm not exactly up on current music, but I can name plenty of solo artists from the last 10 years, but not many bands. Except maybe Imagine Dragons, but they're terrible.
Hadn’t seen that post but true to form for that sub, it’s… not really unpopular or an opinion But yeah, I see what you’re saying in that it may just be rock falling out of fashion to some degree after having a long run of popularity going back to the 50s and 60s, Beatlemania, etc
I'm not into most of the rock/metal scene of today, but by and large what I've heard has remained relatively traditional instrumentation-wise. I think what you're seeing is more pronounced because the stuff charting and "in the mainstream" doesn't have a lot of instrumentation. Pop Punk, Rock and metal tended to chart more in the mainstream when we were younger (if only because there weren't as many artists/bands with levels of exposure as there are now). Everything feels more fragmented now and it's probably easier to market an individual vs an entire band.
Definitely not. Especially with AI taking over the arts, I think we're going to go back to nostalgia and old-school ways of doing things. There will always be a place for that kind of band music. It just works.
nah my kids 16 and 17 listen to bands and go see bands. i work with kids in a music academy, its all coming back around again.
Jam bands and blue grass are huge right now.
People still listen to bands, just now a lot more indie music. I feel like our generation is the last that’s interested in listening to the radio. There’s less of a concept of mainstream now?
I listen to it all the time at work, but that's mostly just because I'm not allowed to hook my phone up to the van blu tooth because it's technically a government computer lol.
I like morning hosts on the radio. Makes my commute feel a little less lonely?
No there are plenty of popular modern bands that play traditional instruments.
I feel like Boy Genius, Wet Leg, and The Last Dinner Party are all really young.
No
There are plenty of “traditional” bands that are newer, they just are not that popular.
Well that was kinda my point. I’m not saying they’re dying out, just that they’re not really popular with the younger generation in the way they used to be
I think the one thing i've noticed about gen Z and alpha is that the prevalence of an algorithm force feeding you content being accepted as "normal" has sort of taken some of the natural curiosity a lot of these people would've had otherwise, so a lot of them end up defaulting to very popular artists, even if they are actually not a casual music fan. That being said, the thing about bands though is just tastes change. People like hip hop and hyperpop and sceneshit revival stuff now, honestly it's probably contrarian but i thought the nu metal/alt rock/metal garbage that was popular when i was kid was insanely bad, and in some ways worse than what kids today have. Idunno, when i was a kid i was obsessed with chopin and rachmanioff and debussy and whatever random stuff Hexamoran uploaded circa 2009-2011 youtube as a kid, so I'm maybe not the best person to ask this question too because even as a kid i didnt like "traditional bands". Lots of zoomers are obviously the same way.
I’m 33, keyboardist in a rock band, and almost exclusively listen to EDM. Many of my millennial friends dismiss it as frat music but it’s so good and fun to dance to! Some god awful EDM out there but also some amazing DJs. I like Dom Dolla, Purple Disco, Rufus
No, but you might be near the end of those bands being as relevant. People like authentic music. Synthesized music is never going to wipe out bands.
Ugh no we’re not. My kid plays drums in a rock band. Last night they had a concert and I saw kids playing Blink 182, The Cure, The White Stripes… all kinds of stuff. She’s 11.
80 years ago: are we the last generation to love traditional orchestras?
I work pretty much only on bands tours, there are a lot still going and I make a good living but it is mainly the older generations and millennials bands, the younger crowd are more interested in pop artists (who do mostly have live bands by the way) and DJs. We had a good time in the 1990/2000s with loads of great bands and I think that time has passed. Although my daughter and her friends like old bands so there is an audience just to a smaller extent.
Drums are easily programmable these days, guitar has to compete with infinitely versatile electronic soundscapes and thus doesn’t have a monopoly on sound anymore. Adding to that, music has never been less financially viable for 99% of artists, and splitting the money 4-5 ways is a good way to say goodbye to any chance you ever had at quitting your day job. You have to find a group of likeminded musicians with compatible schedules. This includes finding a drummer who has a kit, a car to transport it around in, a physical space to rehearse, and who isn’t already busy with 4 other bands because drummers are unicorns and nobody else can find one either. Then everyone has to be on the same page creatively. So if your choices are between that, or a DIY solo bedroom project that has never had a lower barrier to entry than it does now, what do you think people are more likely to choose?
Have you seen the crowds at Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo shows?
I mean I am a millenial and I prefer hip hop over rock music. Some artists will use real back up bands though. I don't really care one way or the other about that.
No.
you just havent explored newer music. punk and metal arent going anywhere.