My usual routine when I’ve exhausted the social media sites that I visit four or five times a day is to rotate between a specific three or four websites. I usually check in with ESPN, fivethirtyeight, reddit, and Rolling Stone. About a week ago when I was following this same pattern I stumbled onto Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. After scrolling through the first fifty songs I realized that there were a good amount of songs from the 1960’s. Being a fan of data and visualizations of data I set out to figure out to visualize the 500 greatest songs (according to Rolling Stone). My initial questions was “what does Rolling Stone consider to be the best decade for making music?” and my second question was “what was the greatest year to make music in?”. Here is what I found:

This graph supported what I found to be true of the first fifty songs in the list. A large amount of the “greatest songs” were produced in the 1960’s. More surprising however was how the graph as skewed to the right implying that since the height of musical creating in the 60’s and 70’s Rolling Stone seems to believe that that musical quality is decreasing. However, it could also be that music from the 90’s like: Nirvana, Weezer, and The Beastie Boys (all present in the top 500) haven’t aged enough to become provoke a proclamation by the general public that the 90’s provided us with numerous classics. Finally, it could be that people have gotten to used to saying that the bands and artists of the 60’s and 70’s were so musically talented that people just give them undeserved recognition (these days if you even hint at not liking The Beatles, people treat it like you just punched their mother in the face). Whatever the case may be when we broke it down into a pie chart it was clear that the 60’s and 70’s reigned supreme.

As we see here, the songs from the 60’s and 70’s account for more almost two-thirds of the entire list (64.5%). Songs from the 60’s alone occupy 1/3 of the spots on the list (they also represent 5 of the top 10 songs).

So, in conclusion, the 60’s rocked harder than any other decade in music and a lot the inspiration hung around through the 1970’s and started to taper off through the 80’s and 90’s. Or the THIRD VARIABLE possibility (I’m stoked that I finally got to work the name of my site in on here) is that music from the 80’s and 90’s hasn’t been around long enough. So in 20 or 30 years, like a fine wine, the music from those decades will usurp the tired and dusty “classics” from the 60’s and 70’s.

P.S.D.

There is no post-scipt data for this post. I am currently working on a side by side comparison with a top 200 that Spotify released based on their data but that will take a lot longer because spotify dose not list year next to individual song. So look forward to that.