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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Yes but:

1) Chart toppers from previous eras are still listenable. Almost nothing on the charts today will be listenable in 2 years. Out-of-touch grandparents in the 1960s could have been convinced to listen to the Beatles. Nobody of a certain age will put up with Top 40 today.

2) It's not quite as democratic as you'd imagine. There are promotions, placements, trends, people sucking kids into clicks in big herds.

A major issue is that today music is more global, and there is a much wider, much lower common denominator.

It used to be 200M Americans, now it's 4B global listeners, Americans are a tiny fraction of that.

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Plenty of Top 40 is still generic easy listening for anyone. Ed Sheeran - Perfect is the 8th most streamed song on Spotify and could have been released in basically any era. Bruno Mars - Uptown Funk is the 6th most viewed video on Youtube and sounds straight out to the 70s to me.

Absolutely - if Ed and Bruno were more prevalent, no doubt. But look at the actual Hot100. It's just not that, it's very dominated by unlistenable stuff.

Ēd Sheeran was so prevalent at one point that they had to change the rules for the Top40 (in the UK), limiting it to 3 from the same artist [0].

16 out of the top 20 songs were from Ed when he released his 2017 album ÷.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jun/27/official-chart...

Yes, Ed as an individual is amazingly prevalent, I was aware of that. But overall, that kind of music, is not. Have a look at the Hot100 right now:

https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100

clearly the songs are all very “listenable”—they’re the most popular songs in the country and apparently the world right now

> Chart toppers from previous eras are still listenable. Almost nothing on the charts today will be listenable in 2 years. Out-of-touch grandparents in the 1960s could have been convinced to listen to the Beatles. Nobody of a certain age will put up with Top 40 today.

That feels like being quite selective. The Beatles were not the only band existing in the 60s, and a lot of stuff that did top the charts in the 60s was entirely ephemeral.

And... the Beatles were relatively unique in that they had a moderately wide range of style, certainly compared to their most of their contemporaries. Yes, grandparents in the 60s probably would have put up with Yesterday, Michelle, Till There Was You, A Taste of Honey and similar 'ballad/acoustic/soft' songs. They would not have put up with or enjoyed Long Tally Sally or Twist and Shout.

Source: Mother-in-law who was a young parent outside Liverpool in the mid 60s, relaying the reactions of her parents' generation to the Beatles and "beat/rock" music of the 60s.

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