Readers reply: will there ever again be a band as big as the Beatles or the Stones?

The 2020s have seen many individual pop artists make it big: Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Sabrina Carpenter, Harry Styles. But the charts are not full of bands the way they used to be. Is the era of the all-conquering group that puts its stamp on popular culture (Abba, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles) over, never to return? Dominique Perrault, Cannes

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Readers reply

Oasis. Thirdhandluke

Maybe not, but Oasis fandom is giving it a damn good try. dfic1999

I’m not sure how best to measure the “cultural significance” of bands. If you go on pure sales then you’d have to include bands like the Eagles, and I doubt many in the UK would call them culturally significant – just as we might not consider the cultural significance of country music. Maybe the amount of breakthrough into everyday news? I think we know as much about the relationship between the Gallaghers as we did about Lennon and McCartney. Famous marriages help – Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow? The Oasis/Blur rivalry was hyped up as the next Stones/Beatles. Ozzy was always in the news. Influence on other bands? The Beatles will top this, but it is generational – many people say that they only joined a band because of the Sex Pistols. Some say the Smiths, some Joy Division/New Order. DukeApricot

The question is about bands rather than popular music as such, but at the moment it’s more like the undercurrent of singer-songwriters of the 60s and 70s. Taylor Swift, for instance, is probably as big as the Beatles – she’s on the news pages, not just the music pages – but bands? No. jno50

No, I don’t think so. The Beatles were propelled into the limelight by the surge of the baby boomers, plus a wealth of practical experience playing live gigs at fairgrounds, in Hamburg and at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. Above all, they had musical talent, and spent days in the recording studio to perfect their numbers. I cannot see another band coming along with anywhere near the same experience, talent and presence. DrBlamm0

I agree. All of that was enabled by vast numbers of people paying to see live music, then paying for albums. There was an enormous amount of money flowing into the music industry, enabling artists to get started, experiment and flourish. But now, how much money do people spend on music? Free Spotify, and the occasional £80 to see a band that’s already extremely famous (most of which is eaten up by the costs of the actual tour)? The grassroots venues are closing and nobody’s buying music. That’s not the audience’s fault, by the way. It’s the music industry’s, for treating the product like it has no value, and allowing it to be given away for free. Alex42

Bands are a fairly short-lived phenomenon. Before the 1960s, there were very few bands in the charts. It was mainly individual artists (occasionally with a named backing group) and vocal groups. It first started to change with instrumental groups like the Shadows and the Ventures, which led on to bands in which the vocalist(s) was an integral element. Chart-wise, they’ve been declining for most of this century, and I suspect one of the reasons is that the industry has always found bands annoying – they split up, argue about creative control. Boy/girl bands and individuals are much easier to manage. alexito

Will there ever again be an all-conquering composer of concertos, or of musical theatre, or an all-conquering trumpet jazz band? No, those are bygone eras and are no longer relevant to most listeners, and neither are the Beatles. They were all big, they came, changed everything, then went and nobody born subsequently listens any more. Music always moves onwards, and the present explosions of creativity of solo vocalists and electronic producers could not have been possible in earlier eras. Something else will replace those too. Randomusername222

I wonder whether the arrival of streaming has diversified music-listening to the point where nobody can dominate. Even in the 80s, a hit song would be everywhere. Now I can happily live in a highly diversified bubble listening to Etta James, Leftfield, St Vincent and Ambrose & his Orchestra back to back, and honestly say I wouldn’t recognise any Taylor Swift song. TobermoryNightlife

The internet has scattered our focus so much. The Beatles were able to put their stamp on the music, TV shows and films that everyone listened to or saw. We don’t have a monoculture that would allow a band as big as the Beatles again. Who even is the biggest gen Z band? Geese? tomtheintrigued_09

BTS, if we are counting the whole world, not simply the west. WhenIsTheEpiphany

Glad somebody has a sense of humour. Waigu_Daji8

Interestingly, the Beatles and the Stones are still in the Top 100 album charts. As they are every week. People, including a lot of young people, I suspect, seem quite happy to get their “band music” today from the likes of the Beatles, Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Abba, Oasis and Queen. PeterNewcastle

I wonder if it’s that far fewer people are able to play instruments. When I was little, all the schools I went to had an orchestra and music lessons. Nowadays, it seems to be nowhere near as common. Bands like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin were phenomenal musicians, and part of the reason for that is that they came from a culture where a lot of people played instruments, and encouraged each other to get better and better. Alex42

The music scene is very different now than it was when the Stones and the Beatles were dominant. Where are the radio stations where a disc jockey, to use a quaint and archaic term, might expose a person to a new song? Or the local venues featuring live music that gave musicians a chance to play to people in real time, and an analog world where the notes being played were the ones an audience heard? Streamed music sounds different to how it does live or on vinyl or disc. People are accustomed to a much more manipulated sound, Auto-Tuned and bass-heavy and often sampled. In a heavily curated musical world, there are fewer opportunities to be gobsmacked by a song out of the blue, seek out the musician’s work and then buy a ticket to their show in a venue that has room for hundreds not thousands. GrannieSal

The question seems to mix two ideas: chart dominance and cultural impact. How are we to cleanly compare the cultural impact of Taylor Swift and the Beatles? Björk and Britney Spears? Could we say that Bryan Adams or Wet Wet Wet echoed down the years, or that Ed Sheeran has had more cultural impact merely by virtue of charting for twice as long as Michael Jackson? Did Christmas No 1s about sausage rolls really offer the most incisive post-austerity commentary on the state of the world? Understanding the cultural impact of music and musicians requires careful ethnographic study. We might use quantitative data such as sales figures to refute or support our observations and analysis, and that will always be caveated by the limitations of comparing, say, chart compilation methods and music reproduction technology in the 1960s with those prevalent today. Dorkalicious

No. Once, enough income was generated to pay 20 musicians, the band leader, the greasy-fingered promoters and the bus driver from the sales of a bit of sheet music, a fair few shellac records, and admission tickets.

Then came amplification and put the kibosh on all that. There was enough income generated to pay four or five musicians, the greasy-fingered promoters, the greasy-fingered A&R hangers-on and the bus drivers, roadies, and the helicopter pilots, from a tiny amount of sheet music, an enormous amount of vinyl records, bedroom wall posters, tour T-shirts, and admission tickets.

Then came the internet and put the kibosh on all that. Now there’s enough income generated from streaming, and admission tickets to pay one musician, a heap of special effects, AI backing music, anti-ageing holograms, greasy-fingered promoters, greasy-fingered online platform owners, event managers, security consultants, concert technologists, psychologists, therapists, bus drivers, and private jet pilots.

Every era has its music, every era has its format. You could, with a job in a factory, easily afford a ticket to go and see a band who wrote songs about the life you were familiar with, because the people in the band were the kind of people you grew up with. Now? There is all the noise of pushing, moulding, promoting, marketing, and selling auto-songs by people who perform in their underwear – that’s the big stuff. It’s clear there are loads of local bands, and more than enough for the mid-range circuit, but there are no young, original, giant bands any more, not as we know them, Jim? Jim? bricklayersoption

Don’t you just mean: a band as big as the Beatles? The Stones have lasted but were never as big. Abba wasn’t a band, just a vocal group with a couple of players. WoollyAphid

Just what I was going to say. The Rolling Stones were nowhere near the Beatles. Led Zeppelin sold a lot of records, but their cultural impact was close to zero. MFowke

Led Zeppelin’s tracks are regularly sampled by hip-hop and electronic musicians today, which I guess is some kind of cultural impact? Randomusername222

Yes, some kind of impact – close to zero. The Beatles changed the world. MFowke

The whole genre of heavy metal. You might sneer, but it is certainly culturally significant. DukeApricot