Which Music Stars are Being Forgotten the Fastest?
Because Father Time shows no mercy
Over the last few months, I’ve often opened this newsletter with a sentence like, “Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, where music and data meet.” Even so, the last few editions haven’t involved that much data. We’ll buck that trend today as we return to our data-driven roots in order to measure the artists that we are forgetting the fastest.
If you want more music and data, consider ordering a copy of my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music covering the period from 1958 to 2025.
Which Music Stars are Being Forgotten the Fastest?
By Chris Dalla Riva
Last week, people got angry at me on TikTok when I said that I never understood people who claimed not to like The Beatles. And this isn’t just because I love The Beatles. I also love AC/DC, but I could understand why somebody wouldn’t like them. AC/DC has a pretty consistent sound. If you don’t like a few of their songs, you probably won’t like any of them.
The Beatles aren’t like this, though. Their catalog is just so varied. Sure, you might not like their early rock ‘n’ roll music, but they’ve also got psychedelic music and soul music and folk music and hard rock music and experimental music and Indian music. If you claim you don’t like any of that, it suggests to me that (a) you’re very close minded or (b) you need to listen to more of The Beatles.
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Many people on TikTok did not agree with this take. This wasn’t a shock. TikTok has a great way of bringing your posts to the people who will disagree with them the most. (See also when I posted that I didn’t like Original Pirate Material by The Streets and was attacked by every British person on the app.) Regardless of your opinion of my opinion, I do feel pretty sure that The Beatles are one of the best remembered bands of all time.
Here’s one way we can measure that. The Beatles were very popular in the 1960s. In fact, they had the second most top 40 hits of the decade after Elvis Presley. (Of note, The King’s hits were packed in the first few years of the 1960s.) All these years later, The Beatles remain very popular. In fact, they are not only the most popular artist from the 1960s on Spotify, but their monthly listeners rival many contemporary pop stars.
Using a similar idea, we can measure which artists who were once popular have been most forgotten. To do this, we will sort artists who had at least ten top 40 hits in the 1960s by least to most popular on Spotify. Once we do that, we are left with a list of artists you’ve probably never heard of unless you were alive at the time.
