re: Is rock dead?

Up until the probably 2000s, rock was popular. Teenaged girls even listened to it. Knew the artists. Knew the songs. The bands were known in pop culture.

The bands were popular among “regular” people. Everyone knew who Eddie Van Halen was. Ozzy Osbourne. Eddie Vedder. Flea. Jack White.

People have responded to the OP listing a bunch of niche metal bands that 99.9 percent of the country has never heard of as proof that rock is not dead.

Yes, legacy bands are still touring to a mostly legacy audience of their original fans.

But there are no rock bands that are in the zeitgeist of today.

quote:

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These are 30-50 year old legacy bands

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Do 30-50 year old legacy bands not inspire their younger fans to play a guitar?

Oasis, Metallica, Green Day, all the nu metal bands like deftones, papa roach, linkin park are immensely popular amongst kids on tik tok. I thought the oasis show I went to would be all guys my age. It was 50/50 young 20s and 40s/50s and if I had to tilt it either way it would be younger. So that’s 45k younger people showing up per show.

I wouldn’t call them niche at all.

I think it’s more that things are more visible than ever through social media so pop will be even more in your face than ever before.

They are "niche" to old people because MTV is out of the music business and modern rock radio is basically non-existent. You will hear bands like Sleep Token and Bring Me the Horizon all over tik Tok though. Sleep Token headlined Download Festival earlier this summer to around 100,000 fans and have a sold out US arena tour coming up.

Sleep Token, Bad Omens, and Spiritbox all take a lot of influence from pop. That's a big part of the reason they're so popular.

You can’t kill rock music. It’s too captivating and powerful for that.

I wouldn't compare any of them to Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter, but they're not Slayer either. Spiritbox is fairly heavy but uses some pop melodies and vocals at times. Korn and Limp Bizkit take a lot of influence from rap but no one would call them rap acts.

I think it's starting to make a comeback slowly with younger kids. the dj era is dying out

you still have bands performing like oasis and my chemical romance in front of stadium crowds with young and old fans. old bands are still doing well

There are no rock bands founded within the last 25 years among the top 250 most streamed artists on Spotify.

The highest ranked one is Maneskin at No. 256.

Bring Me The Horizon is ranked No. 262, but were founded in 2004.

There are a few in the 300 and 400s, but less than 10 “new” rock/metal bands in the top 600.

Rock and Roll Has Died


This is a few years old, but Sina has recently posted covers of Led Zeppelin and 35 minutes from The Who's Tommy. The vocalist on this was Victoria Knight, who fronted her own rock band in Australia; the guitarist Andrei then had a good rock/metal band in Romania and a couple other bands since; the Japanese bassist Juna is known as "The Princess of Funk" but lends herself mostly to jazz.

Edited to add that she has posted a couple original songs that would be considered rock.

I've seen The Warning posted here before, and a somewhat parallel story could be The Sixsters, a girl rock band from Ukraine. When the war came three years ago, original singer Victoria, then 17, took her pet cat and boarded a train from Kyiv to end up in Warsaw, Poland. The other girls revived the band in Germany, and are very capable and original.

Here is the original performance that started them up, and may have contributed to the election of President Zelenskyy, though with lesser quality audio than the version posted on the band's channel. Golosuyu (I'm Voting, or Vote)