Where have all the bands gone?
Hi, Ivan here! 👋 I develop visualizations at Datawrapper, and in today's Weekly Chart, let's take a look at changing trends in popular music.
Some time ago, I came across a video that discussed how bands have mostly disappeared from music charts and how solo artists now dominate the charts instead.
I must admit: I don't closely follow mainstream music trends, but this clip still resonated with me. I honestly struggle to think of many popular bands (think: The Beatles) that are highly visible in the media these days, so my gut feeling tells me that there would be fewer bands in the charts than before.
But is there data to back it up?
It appears that bands are indeed on the wane, at least at the top of the charts. With a few exceptions, the summit of Billboard Hot 100 has been dominated by solo artists and collaborations in the past two decades. The peak of the band era was in the 60s, driven by acts such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys. Since then, bands have been in steady decline, dropping off especially heavily since the early 2000s. Instead, solo artists such as Taylor Swift and Drake rule the charts now.
Also notable is the rise of collaborations, where multiple solo artists (and more rarely a solo artist and a band) release a song together. In the age of solo artists, a collaboration allows the involved artists to produce a hit while retaining their distinct identities. There are a number of reasons why collaborations have become so popular:
Music has become more genre-diverse.
Collaborations can attract more listeners, which is important in the age of music streaming.
These days, music production can happen completely remotely — no need for all collaborators to come into the studio together to record a song.
I created another chronological chart for a deeper dive into number-one hit songs. (Tap or hover over each square to see the details.) It reveals some interesting details! For example, how bands had a temporary reprieve at the top of the charts in recent decades, thanks to BTS in 2021 and The Black Eyed Peas in 2009.
So why are bands less successful these days? Are there fewer bands overall, or are they just struggling to break through to the top of the charts?
There are probably no clear-cut answers, but here are some possibilities:
The style of popular music has changed. Rock music used to be more popular in the past, which naturally lends itself to bands. Modern popular music has a lot of hip-hop, r'n'b, electronic, and folk influences, which lend themselves better to solo performers.
It's likely easier to market a solo artist than a band, since a solo artist allows for a clearer focus on a single personality.
In general, the distinction between bands and solo artists may not be so clear, so the decision for an artist to "appear" as a band or solo could be driven by marketing, for example, to follow the current popular trends.
Bands are frequently a product of a single individual songwriter or performer, often backed by a band of instrumentalists.
Coming from the other direction, solo artists are, strictly speaking, rarely solo. There are almost always multiple people involved when writing and producing a song, even if it is marketed under a solo artist's name.
So what do I make of bands seemingly losing relevance? To me, it feels like a natural consequence of our digital streaming age and changing tastes in music. The presentation and sound of popular music may have changed, but at its core, the anatomy of a hit song is perhaps not that different, whether it’s by a band in 1965 or a solo artist in 2022.
That's it from me this week! I hope you enjoyed the chart, even if you long for the days of hearing rock bands on top of the charts. 🎸🎶 Let me know at ivan@datawrapper.de or on Bluesky if you have any comments. We'll see you next week!
Notes
I used the following resources and tools to prepare the chart data:
MusicBrainz to check whether any given artist is a band or a solo artist.
A couple of homegrown Node.js scripts to query the MusicBrainz API (in particular, the musicbrainz-api package was very helpful for interacting with the MusicBrainz API using JavaScript) and to aggregate and glue together the data into the required format.
