I wonder if anyone else's perception of 70s music is biased by what you hear on "classic rock" radio. It's surprising how little overlap there seems to be between the top 40 of the decade, and the stuff that gets played today on FM radio. I can understand the album-oriented or progressive bands being bigger in album or ticket sales than single sales or radio airplay. Pink Floyd and Yes weren't exactly radio-friendly at the time. But were there no top-40 performers in the decade that had enough staying power to qualify as "classic rock" by the 2010s? Not even Springsteen, apparently.
There seems to be more overlap in the 80s—U2, Dire Straits, Van Halen, the Police, and Bryan Adams come immediately to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_singles_of_1977
12, Dancing Queen, 1977. That’s tops.
ABBA is great; I have an album now of theirs I’ve copied and my son is now loving it.
“Classic Rock” to me always meant “hard rock”, not actually popular. Lord knows we’ve had “classic rock” stations around here for decades and they play hard rock mostly c.1970 when I was forced to listen c. 1990, and it’s only progressed a little since then to newer.
Popular should be and is a GENERAL term - what is popular? Sorry, not a whole lot of hard/heavy/punk/etc bands actually made it on the charts. But LOTS of fringe types who worship this stuff sure hang out on-line and live in a fantasy world that their preference was the only good stuff and that everyone loved it. Not quite.
My husband taught me about “album-oriented rock” recently, stating he found out about it in college (80s) when the campus station called itself that. He replied to the hipster DJs that this must mean the music nobody listens to. Which upset their poor little hearts.
They can’t stand that they’re the odd men out.
I better shut up before I get myself in trouble! Off the soap box (i.e., I’ve heard all the bellyaching every time there is a music discussion, esp. with these charts - that there’s “no good music” here; these people seem to overpopulate the ‘net because their taste is NOT reflected by reality on the charts)