Television variety show host Ed Sullivan took a trip to London in the 1960s and, upon discovering the popularity of a young band, he invited them to America. The Beatles made their first live U.S. television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, performing five songs: "I Want to Hold Your Hand", "All My Loving", "She Loves You", "Till There Was You", and "I Saw Her Standing There.” “Beatlemania” was born after the most-watched TV event in history—a cultural landmark that changed the course of music. Many young viewers were inspired to become rock musicians.
Those heady days of rock ‘n roll bands are long gone. Bands are disappearing from the music charts. The current Spotify top 50 chart—songs I'm unfamiliar with—has the following artists in its Top 10, not one of them a band: Sabrina Carpenter, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Jimin, Chapelle Roan, Billie Eilish, Post Malone, and Shaboozy. Dialing back to 1969, seven of the year-end Top 10 songs were from bands: The Rolling Stones, The Temptations, The 5th Dimension, Tommy James and the Shondells, Sly and The Family Stone (two hit songs), and The Foundations.
That was a peak year in rock music’s history, when the buzz was all about identifying the new band coming down the pike. But that pipeline has dried up. Any band with the potential to make it on to the Spotify chart would be made up of musicians in their 40s, at the youngest—Coldplay, for example. Of the top 400 artists on Spotify, by number of listeners, only three of the bands on the current list were formed in the past 10 years.
As Noel Gallagher from the band Oasis put it, “You have to accept that the great stories we all see in the documentaries—it's not possible anymore. I don't think the story of five guys from a council estate, who are gonna do what we did, is possible anymore."
A look at the British pop charts bears this out. In the first half of the 1980s, bands (Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants, etc.) spent 146 weeks at the Number One spot; from 1990-1995, bands (Wet Wet Wet, Take That, Erasure, etc.) spent 141 weeks at Number One; from 2020-2024, the total was three weeks. One of those weeks was the Beatles’ “Now and Then”; the other two were Little Mix and Live Lounge All Stars, which was a collection of solo acts.
The charts aren’t as relevant anymore, as when The Beatles would vie with The Stones for the slot at the top. That was an era when fans had to shell out cash for records, which is no longer the case now that streaming prevails. Unlike now, record labels were willing to spend big bucks on promising bands, giving them multi-album contracts. That was when names like Decca, Atlantic, Capitol Records, Atco, EMI, Electra, and Polygram prevailed. When I was a major buyer of LPs, I recognized all of those labels instantly just by their design. They told me I was buying something worth listening to. I recall unwrapping albums, seeing that familiar label in the center of the vinyl, and feeling a sense of anticipation.
A concise illustration of the trend away from bands is the example of Rostam Batmanglij, a founding member of—and keyboard and guitar player for—Vampire Weekend. Batmanglij produced the group’s first two studio albums and co-produced the third, which won the “best alternative album” award at the 2014 Grammy awards. He then left the group to pursue solo projects, announcing on Twitter, “My identity as songwriter/producer, I realized, needs to stand on its own, still connected to the people I work with, but through the songs we make together.”
Try to imagine George Harrison, at the height of The Beatles’ fame, declaring that he was stepping away from the band for business reasons, but would continue to collaborate with John, Paul, and Ringo. It's a different game now, as evidenced by this quote from Batmanglij: “Even though I’ve been making electronic music since I was 14, it’s hard for people to see you as a producer with a musical identity when you’re contextualized in a band that performs on a stage.”
It's definitely a new era when a member of a successful band is concerned that that job will “contextualize” him, interfering with his career as a producer. Bands were once at the center of the culture in both the U.S. and the U.K. When The Beatles or the Stones released a new album, it was an event met with anticipation and media attention. This culture no longer exists. The last new album from a band I looked forward to was Wilco’s Wilco: The Album, released in 2009.
The shift kicked in in the 1990s and early-2000s. All the bands that used to have cultural heft wrote their own songs, but then corny boy bands like the Backstreet Boys came along with songs by hired writers. Even Aerosmith took this route, having Dianne Warren write their only number one song—”I Don't Want To Miss A Thing.” Record label sales were down, and their risk tolerance followed suit. Needing hits, they started to cut bands out of the creative process, even replacing certain band members on recordings. If they didn't like a band’s drummer, they'd hire their own for the studio. Bands no longer called the shots as such business practices continued. Record labels began to think of them as Hollywood thinks of writers—disposable commodities.
Modern technology allows solo artists to avoid being in a band, an activity that presents interpersonal challenges. There's less hassle, but it comes with the sacrifice of the collaborative creativity a tight group of musicians working together for years can produce. A solo artist can now record a song on a laptop in their bedroom, release it on TikTok, and get a hit. Record labels prefer those solo artists over bands. It's easier to control a single person versus a group, and it's faster to produce hits because bands write slower than the groups of writers that record labels now hire. There's also the risk factor. Yoko can't break up the band if Yoko is the band.
Brian Wilson, founder and creative force behind The Beach Boys, is considered by many as modern music’s great genius. It's interesting to note how similar his approach to making music was to the current model. He wrote the band’s masterpiece, Pet Sounds, without his fellow band members. Beach Boy Mike Love’s lyrical abilities didn't extend much beyond beaches, hotrods, and bikinis, so Wilson brought in the more sophisticated wordsmith Tony Asher for the lyrics, and then recorded the music with a hot studio band, The Wrecking Crew, when his bandmates were out on the road on tour. All Wilson needed from them was some singing to complete the album when they returned to L.A. In essence, he relegated his own band to boy-band status. In the hands of a genius, that approach worked to produce one of the greatest albums ever released. But it's not working at the moment, unless K-pop star Jimin’s assembly-line fluff appeals to you.