Who knows. I can give you plenty of songs that SHOULD be remembered, like most of Nick Cave’s catalog even his bad albums are pretty freaking amazing. David Bowie’s 3 most recent album are some of the best of his career, Johnny Cash’s final 6 are some of the best albums of anybody’s career. Last year was amazing all around (Cave, Bowie, Suicidal Tendencies, Megadeth, NIN, Planet P Project, Black Sabbath, Martin Barre, Monster Magnet, I’m sure I’m forgetting some) I’m still finding great stuff that got released and I missed it (just found out about Martin’s album last week).
The industry (like all of entertainment) has gotten so fractured now it’s hard to imagine any of it being remembered though because even the “hits” have sales that are tiny in the overall picture and it’s so easy to avoid hearing stuff you don’t want to. Off the top of my head I don’t think I could even recognize a Lady Gaga song, I have no idea what her voice sounds like and don’t know if I’ve ever heard her at all, presumably I have but I don’t know which songs. And probably most folks on this thread don’t know who half the bands I named off are. We now get to live in our own bubble, we don’t all watch one of the same 3 TV networks and don’t all listen to one of the same 5 types of radio stations anymore. That small distribution system kept us all on the same page, even if you didn’t listen to country you heard country because your town had a country station and place you went played it, so if something really big happened in country you became aware. Now that store that played country has picked one of the dozens of country stations on XM and you don’t even know if the stuff they’re piping in is from this decade.
It’ll be interesting to see when they start making period movies about this era. That’s really when you start seeing an era’s lasting mark. I don’t know what music directors are going to do, while the era has great music I don’t think it has defining music.
I must admit, that Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” is probably the first “pop” song I recall liking in a long time. Of course now it’s getting played to death.