You forgot "Playing for free is killing gig money for everyone!". Or worse yet, was this " pay to play"??
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Is Rock and Roll Dead? Not quite yet...
- Thread starter oldandbold
- Start date
I'm looking pretty hard.
My post was, of course, a bit tongue in cheek, but... Yeah, rock is not doing well these days.
The top 10 grossing concert acts for 2018 were, in order:
Ed Sheeran (pop)
Taylor Swift (pop)
Jay-Z/Beyonce (hip-hop/R&B)
Pink (pop)
Bruno Mars (pop)
Eagles (a 48 year old rock band; Henly is 71)
Justin Timberlake (pop)
Roger Waters (rockin' for 54 years; he's now 75)
The Rolling Stones (57 years; Mick is 75)
Kenny Chesney (country)
Rock is basically absent from the Billboard Hot 100 charts these days. It's all hip-hop, R&B, pop, and a tiny bit of country. Almost every rock album on the Top 200 is decades old. Even the acts people tout as being "new rock" often sound like they are stuck in the 70s or, at best, 80s. Innovative rock music is rarer and more marginalized than ever, and half the time it kinda stops being rock in the process anyway.
I mean, really. What are people in this thread excited about? A bunch of young kids playing a song that is 50 years old? C'mon.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to yell at a bunch of kids on my lawn.
Top grossing tours;
Based on this measure, Jazz, Reggae, Bluegrass, Folk, Blues, and several genres of music are all dead. The point is that no artist of any of these genres were ever top grossing concert tours. Rock artists dominated top grossing tours for about four decades & looks there are still a couple on the list.
Billboard Hot 100
Considering "pop" is not a music genre, but what is considered popular for the time period, the Beatles, Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Yes, Jethro Tull, etc. were all pop music at one time. Jazz, Bluegrass, etc. have never been considered pop, yet they aren't dead.
Rock artists dominated billboard Hot 100 for about four decades.
Radio
The #1 genre of music that is most "pop"ular on radio is modern country. It's also #2 among teen listeners. There was one country artist on the top grossing concert tour list.
All this indicates is, depending on how you measure it, the death of a music type is hard to pin down. There is no doubt that rock is not the dominant music it once was by any measure, or is it? Look at some artists in the RRHOF. All rock? Madonna is in there.
Maybe the five artist you listed as "pop" are actually rock artists......
