Are bands really disappearing or is it a myth?

Far Out Magazine ^ | February 25, 2025 | Tom Phelan

[DoodleBob]

Despite the ‘album era’ fast approaching its approximate 60th anniversary, the lauded rock heritage that deified stadium monsters such as Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones as the paragons of musical achievement and authentic expression still looms over a pop climate that’s undergone seismic creative and social shifts across the last half-century. It won’t be too long before the cultural totems that still command such collective veneration, rock and roll, Woodstock, and AOR, will all cease to be living memories sooner than you think.

With Rolling Stone‘s ‘rockist’ residue still colouring many muso’s quality metrics and indication of a healthy music climate, the stats collated on the absence of bands from the contemporary charts by TV personality Richard Osman triggered much online debate. Speaking on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast with Marina Hyde last year, Osman revealed that in the first half of the 1980s, there were 146 weeks where bands were number one, with 141 weeks for the first half of the ’90s. Jump to the 2020s, and the number drops to three, one from Little Mix, another from The Beatles’ AI-drossed ‘Now and Then’, and BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge Allstars take on Foo Fighters’ ‘Times Like These’.

On the face of it, it’s all fairly humdrum, and tempting to lapse into curmudgeonly deadends lambasting the supposed artistic degradation of Gen Z and well-trodden theories on an increasingly hyper-individualist fracturing of broader pop culture in the TikTok age.

While there are grains of truth to such talking points and legitimate discussions to be had about risk-averse corporate labels favouring easily marketable solo stars over the complex bag of characters that make up a band, such critique can often feel like ruses to merely attack a youth culture whose trends and expressions alienate one’s rock puritanism, a typical lashing out when the pangs of old age irrelevancy start to rear its head.

The digital age has fundamentally freed up scores of budding artists to create their art without the need for studio time and multiple collaborators, production software and Digital Audio Workstations offering a platform for music-makers to record and release an album entirely in one’s bedroom, handling all promotion and marketing with savvy social media knack as well as send over stems and audio files anywhere in the world for mixing and mastering. Economic pressures, too, have forced artists to go it alone, the dismal revenues made from streaming and loss-incurring tours simply unviable to split across multiple parties.

But the concern for bands ‘disappearing’ only holds water if your search for such artists is as deep as who’s currently in the top ten. At the time of writing on a drizzly morning, tonight Italian kosmiche conjurers Traum are playing Dalston’s The Shacklewell Arms, Million Moons are showering New Cross Inn with their gargantuan industrial post-rock, and Fabric will be host to Decius’ squalid electronics. Beyond London, antipop metallers Gürl will be taking over Bristol’s Exchange, and Newcastle’s The Cluny will witness Renegade Brass Band’s 12-piece fusion of jazz, hip-hop and funk.

Bands are very much alive. Never mind the success of The 1975, The Last Dinner Party, Fontaines DC, and Kneecap bringing back the hip-hop group, but on a grassroots level, there’s a myriad of bands playing some of the most vital music you’ll ever hear.

The stale ‘only bands are good’ prism should die a death, fantastic and innovative art is being forged that will look and sound contrary to the rock monoliths that still serve as eternal barometers of artfulness but, buried beneath homogeneous algorithms and lazy radio curations, a thriving eco-system of bands are cutting essential soundtracks to the febrile contemporary alongside all manner of differing art ensembles and collectives. Let’s celebrate the continued shine of the band, but let’s finally shake off the notion that exciting music must conventionally look like one.

[packrat35]

I agree. I like a lot of different music, but rock is my favorite.

The record companies just don’t market rock music, groups or play them on the radio so you got to find them yourself.