Artists with the most entries in Rolling Stone's 500 best albums:
Beatles: 11
Bob Dylan: 10
Rolling Stones: 10
Bruce Springsteen: 8
The Who: 7
David Bowie: 6
Elton John: 6
5 each: The Byrds, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Otis Redding, U2
4 each: Madonna, Bob Marley, Elvis Costello, Grateful Dead, James Brown, Police, The Smiths, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Prince, Roxy Music, Simon & Garfunkel, Sly & the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Talking Heads.
Decade by decade breakdown: 50s or before: 29 albums (5.8% of total 500 list) 60s: 126 (25.2%, but 55% of the top 20 70s: 183 (36.6%) 80s: 88 (17.6%) 90s: 61 (12.2%) 00s: 13 (2.6%).
Albums by men or male-led groups: 439 (87.8%)
Women or female-led groups: 47 (9.4%)
Mixed groups (with more or less equal female and male lead singers): 14 (2.8%)
I smell conspiracy!
It's not all bad, but these people ignore so much outside of the particular cultural niche in which they live.
How about Jane's Addiction's "Nothing's Shocking?"
Where's Glenn Miller, Kay Kyser or Les Brown?
Hank Williams?
Ralph Stanley?
What usefulness is there in such a poorly written article? As much as anything else that comes out of USA Today I suppose. Yet another piece from them which carefully winds its way between the facts. At least they could have put up one of their asinine charts showing votes represented as vinyl record graphics or something, but that would have required actually printing the names of the runners-up, and even McPaper has to cut a few corners now and then.
There is so little relevant information in this article that it is utterly worthless. Your post, to which I am replying, is far better journalism than the article itself, having a much higher signal-to-noise ratio and far less skew.
For the record, if you'll pardon the pun, I do happen to like Sgt Pepper and respect what it accomplished for popular music very, very much.
But I hate crappy journalism.