Pop Music
I've been spending some time listening to the Billboard "Hot 100": the top 100 songs of the year, as ranked by Billboard Magazine. The archive I'm listening to includes the Hot 100 from 1959 to 2006, and the Hot 50 from 1947 to 1958. Yes, that's almost 60 years of music, over 5000 tracks.
The archive contains pretty much every pop song you're likely to have encountered through heavy radio play. As an exercise, I decided to go through the entire archive and flag "significant" songs. A song is "significant" for me if 1) it's one of those songs that conjures memories for me, or 2) I like the song.
The result is a list of about 1600 songs. They break down as follows:
1947-1959: 54 songs
1960-1969: 144 songs
1970-1979: 236 songs
1980-1989: 417 songs
1990-2000: 525 songs
2000-2006: 251 songs
The 2000s are not yet finished, but if you extrapolate (divide 251 by 7/10, which is 358), you see a substantial decline from the 80s and 90s. It seems correct to conclude that I'm most familiar with (and I enjoy most) "pop" music in the 80s and 90s, and that I'm getting less familiar with (and I enjoy less) pop music from 2000 and beyond.
What's the best explanation for this? Most probably, it's because I cared a lot more about music in the 80s and 90s (when I was growing up: high school was 88-92 for me), and therefore I have many more memories strongly connected with pop music from those years.
Basically, what this means is that I'm getting old....
The archive contains pretty much every pop song you're likely to have encountered through heavy radio play. As an exercise, I decided to go through the entire archive and flag "significant" songs. A song is "significant" for me if 1) it's one of those songs that conjures memories for me, or 2) I like the song.
The result is a list of about 1600 songs. They break down as follows:
1947-1959: 54 songs
1960-1969: 144 songs
1970-1979: 236 songs
1980-1989: 417 songs
1990-2000: 525 songs
2000-2006: 251 songs
The 2000s are not yet finished, but if you extrapolate (divide 251 by 7/10, which is 358), you see a substantial decline from the 80s and 90s. It seems correct to conclude that I'm most familiar with (and I enjoy most) "pop" music in the 80s and 90s, and that I'm getting less familiar with (and I enjoy less) pop music from 2000 and beyond.
What's the best explanation for this? Most probably, it's because I cared a lot more about music in the 80s and 90s (when I was growing up: high school was 88-92 for me), and therefore I have many more memories strongly connected with pop music from those years.
Basically, what this means is that I'm getting old....
