February 2025
Rick Beato is a musician, producer, recording-studio owner, and guitar instructor. His YouTube channel, which Beato established in 2015, has 4.7 million subscribers. On the channel, Beato has covered a lot of subjects in the last ten years, diving into everything from music theory to the current state of the recording industry. Beato has become so popular and well established that he’s been able to interview famous musicians on his show, including David Gilmour, jazz guitarist Mike Stern, Rick Wakeman, and Tori Amos.
My favorite videos on Beato’s channel offer his take on what’s currently going on in music. A couple of months ago, he posted a video titled “Why Are Bands Mysteriously Disappearing?” Beato was reacting to a comment on a UK podcast called The Rest Is Entertainment. Richard Osman cohosts the show with journalist Marina Hyde. Osman is a bit of a renaissance man, with a successful career as a television producer, novelist, and comedian. His brother Mat is the bassist for Blur.
In the podcast, Osman tells Hyde: “What has happened in the charts—that is utterly extraordinary—is the complete disappearance of bands.” He goes on to compare the UK charts during the first years of the 2020s with other decades. “In the first half of the 1980s, there were 146 weeks when bands were number 1. The first half of the ’90s, there were 141 weeks when bands were number 1.”
And now? “In the first five years of this decade: three weeks. We’ve had three number-1 weeks,” he says, referring to the number of weeks where bands topped the charts. “One of which was the [BBC] Radio 1 Live Lounge Allstars, most of whom were soloists anyway. One of which was the Beatles [with “Now and Then”] and one of which was Little Mix—that’s the only kind of official band who’ve had a single week at number 1 in this entire decade.”
Osman is talking about the British charts, but Beato agrees that this illustrated a disturbing trend. Beato maintains that for much of the history of rock music, bands dominated the charts with music they wrote themselves. He lists bands we all know, from the Beatles to Dire Straits to Alice in Chains. He talks about R&B bands, including the Commodores, and he acknowledges that some artists, such as the Supremes, performed songs written by others. But he keeps coming back to his original point: bands dominated the charts for more than 30 years, playing their own tunes.
According to Beato, things began to change in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when writer/producers began to assert their influence. Aerosmith had its biggest hit with “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” a song written by Diane Warren, and other bands made the charts with songs pushed by record companies that were eager to have more hits. Beato says it was often the case that the producer played on a band’s sessions, or hired outside musicians in place of the band. It was a return to the ’60s, when it was the Wrecking Crew playing the instruments rather than the band members themselves on many hit records of the period.
Beato offers some more insight that gives his (and my) concerns some perspective: “As an experiment, I put together a list of the top 400 artists, in ranking of monthly listeners on Spotify, and I looked to see how many bands on there were created in the last ten years. . . . You might think 25 bands, something like that. Has to be a lot, right? It’s actually only three.”
The most devastating statement is delivered near the end of the video: “Rock is just not popular. It just doesn’t connect with young people like it did.” Beato gives some reasons for rock’s decline, including advances in technology that enable solo artists to record music with fewer live musicians, and the difficulty of promoting a band versus hyping a solo artist across various media platforms.
Beato is smart, and as an industry insider he knows the music business well, but it’s worth looking at a couple of things he says more closely. First, rock’n’roll was not band-centric in the early years. Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and plenty of the other fathers of rock were solo acts. Presley didn’t write his own songs, but Lewis penned a few of his hits. And Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino are among the notable ’50s rockers who wrote their own songs.
Second, while it’s true that bands dominated the charts for 30 years, beginning in the mid-1960s, some of the biggest stars during that era were solo performers: Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, James Taylor, Rod Stewart . . . the list goes on. As for producers and record executives calling the shots, a recent article in the New York Times reminds us that during the ’80s, producers encouraged ZZ Top, Don Henley, and Yes to use drum machines and studio technology to freshen their sounds. As a result, all three continued to sell records. In fact, ZZ Top and Yes enjoyed even greater success than they’d had in the previous decade.
Musicians adapt as needed. Music adapts as needed. There’s no denying, however, that Beato’s larger point is true: “Rock is just not popular.” The genre hasn’t been at the center of pop culture for some time. Legacy bands and artists tour and make money and some even continue to record, but largely they fill arenas and stadiums because people want to hear music they recorded before 1990. U2 can still pull a big crowd, but I’m willing to bet only hardcore fans know songs done after Achtung Baby.
For nearly 25 years, the music that dominated pop culture was hip-hop. For a long time, beginning in the late ’90s, I heard it pumping from every van and SUV that kids had borrowed from their parents, in television shows and movies, and on quite a few radio stations. Hip-hop drove the cultural conversation in the same way rock music had during its heyday. It asked us to wrestle with issues of race, class, and culture.
Luminate Data reports that Latin music is the fastest growing genre in streamed music, but R&B/hip-hop is still the most popular genre overall on streaming services. Rock comes in second, then pop. When I look at the lists of the top ten albums, singles, and performers on Spotify for 2024, R&B/hip-hop, pop, and country artists appear on those lists with recent releases. By contrast, articles based on Luminate’s findings, including this one by the Associated Press, point out that 70.5% of rock’s streaming numbers in the US came from “deep catalogs”—tracks released five years or more ago.
Rock music is still with us, then, but it’s not being refreshed. I read the comments on Beato’s YouTube video, and I was struck by how many were from musicians who complained about the limited opportunities for bands to play live. An article in NME reports that nightclubs have been closing in the UK at the rate of 150 per year since March 2020, and that nightclubbing will likely be a thing of the past by 2030.
My own experience is that a solo singer with an acoustic guitar can get regular work, and so can acoustic guitar–based duos, but if you’re hauling in a drum kit or electric guitars, most bars aren’t interested. People go to a bar to watch sports on the big-screen TVs or to talk. Music is in the background.
This column isn’t the right place to look at the decline of live music on a local level, but bands that don’t gig regularly don’t develop playing skills or endurance. They don’t learn how to communicate musically with each other or how to reach out to an audience. Every significant band sharpened its skills by playing live. Without places to play live, bands can’t develop their craft and will likely fade away.
Am I saying that rock’n’roll is dying? Well, I’d say it’s tottering a bit and life support is standing by. The E Street Band’s Steven Van Zandt spoke at length about the current state of rock’n’roll in a recent interview. “The whole band thing was just a big part of our culture growing up, whether you were a musician or not,” he told Collider. “That’s changed, obviously. The culture has changed. We have a whole range of distractions now for this generation.”
Van Zandt says that “rock’n’roll is still the biggest thing, live,” but he tours with Bruce Springsteen, one of the dwindling number of rock stars who can still fill big venues. He acknowledges that clubs, theaters, and arenas no longer have the constant flow of live rock acts that they had in the past. When the Irish News asked him if fellow rocker Gene Simmons was right when he said rock is already dead, Van Zandt responded: “He’s not wrong. We’re not mainstream anymore and we most likely never will be again.”
In truth, no genre of music dies completely. You can track down classical music and jazz on radio, especially online. Even smaller cities have symphony orchestras and a jazz club or two. You can probably find a live rock band playing somewhere nearby, but you’ll have to look around. Indie labels continue to release music by new bands, and with a little work you can find out about them online and stream their music. But the days of the communal music experience that AM and FM radio gave us, supported by fan mags that kept track of what was going on in pop music, are behind us.
Some form of music will take the place of rock as we know it. Rock fans who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s often thought the first generation of rockers were somewhat quaint. In fact, Presley, Lewis, Little Richard, and the rest had caused consternation and panic in parents. That’s how it should be. Whatever comes along next will probably make old guys like me uncomfortable. Hip-hop did that 40 years ago. It’s time for the next trend in pop music to do it again—even if it isn’t performed by bands.
. . . Joseph Taylor
josepht@soundstagenetwork.com
