Hey, everyone. Rockthony Bandtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you guys are doing well.

I caught a recent clip from The Rest is Entertainment podcast featuring Richard Osman and Marina Hyde, where they talked about an interesting phenomenon in the charts today, essentially what Richard describes as the complete disappearance of bands from the chart. Not only rock bands, but bands of all sorts, be they jazz, folk, even large scale pop outfits like One Direction, stuff like that. The one anomaly bucking that trend are all of these K-pop groups that are very popular and viral right now. But for the most part, Richard speaks of a complete disappearance of bands. Let's watch some of that clip.

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And in the first half of the 1980s, there were 146 weeks when bands were number one. The first half of the '90s, there were 141 weeks. In the first five years of this decade, three weeks. We have had three number one weeks, one of which was The Beatles, when they had the lovely comeback single, and one of which was Little Mix. And that's the only official band. You've had a single week at number one in this entire decade.

So, the trends and the numbers are most certainly there, there's no denying that. There does seem to be a severe lack of bands in the charts these days. But I don't know if I would necessarily attribute it to some hyper-individualization or anything, or really to anything that you could categorize as societal degradation or maybe even something nefarious per se. A lot of these significant changes just come down to the creative and musical economic paradigm shifting over the past couple of decades.

I think we also have to stop and ask ourselves whether or not some of these individualization trends that we're seeing right now, were they not also prevalent to some degree in the '70s, in the '80s, in the '90s? Most certainly they were, as solo artists are nothing new. There were plenty of them during those decades, and they were themselves marketable for very much the same reasons that solo artists today. You have an individual who is maybe charismatic, cool-looking, sexy, easy to relate to. Maybe you even create some weird parasocial obsession with them in your mind.

Plus, on top of it, when you're talking about a lot of these bands that used to be maybe cult classics or high up on the charts, not only was it just the music, but often the very strong and notable and memorable personalities behind these groups that drove interest in them, many of whom I could mention by a single name, and a lot of you would know exactly who I'm talking about just because of how legendary these figures are. Be they Cobain or Cornell or Vetter or Mercury, Rezner, Halen, York. So it's not like this fixation on this focus on this obsession with very captivating individuals in the world of music in bands.

Is anything all that new? I think we're seeing just as much of that now as we ever have. But what's changed is that the creative process through which many people make music is vastly different now than it was decades ago. Why would you be in a group of people who all collectively need to make music or make a track or make whatever when you don't really need to be? Economically and creatively speaking, too, that's just inefficient.

Thanks to tutorials, thanks to various types of production technology, often one or two people can do the job of four, five, six, or seven individuals in the studio years ago. So of course, with that being considered, you're going to see a lot of collaborative dynamics breaking down a bit over time because these days it's just easier to do more with fewer people. Not only that, but as I was inferring earlier, it's a matter of economics, too, especially in a music industry where primarily artists are making money off of their music through streaming, which notoriously does not pay very well at all. With many even mid-tier artists, if they're lucky making $10,000 a year in royalties off their streams. That $10,000 tends to not go quite as far when you have to split it between five people. In that sense, by forcing yourself into a band as opposed to more of a solo career or a duo, you could potentially be doing a disservice monetarily to yourself and your career.

On top of that, this very same technology as well as digital communications, makes it really easy to collaborate in a variety of ways than just having four guys just locked into a sweaty, smelly studio for hours. 'Here's my track. Here's my beat. Here's my chord progression. Here are my lyrics. What could you add to them in the DAW? Send it back to me over email.' We're passing files back and forth. We're communicating and working on a song together without even having met face to face. It's not like the art of collaboration is completely gone now. It's just that there are more convenient ways to go about doing it than locking a bunch of dudes together into a contract for life, essentially, and calling it a band.

Even when you have an artist who maybe wants to go for a little bit of a rock thing on their album, or that's just their overall esthetic and vibe, like Olivia Rodrigo, for example, when you want that sound, you want that energy, you often find a producer who could just conjure it all together themselves. With far easier and more widespread access to various types of production technology, the sound of entire rock bands can be conjured by one person.

Lastly, I feel like a bigger and more important question in all of this is, is the music that we're hearing still good, regardless of whether or not it's coming from a band or a single person? Rarely is that single person working entirely alone because behind them there is often a team of writers and producers and various collaborators. I was very much alive and conscious during many of these huge musical eras for bands. And while some of my favorite groups did come out of those eras, some of the worst music I've ever heard in my life is coming from these bands that we miss so much, too.

Personally, I still find a lot of great music on a regular basis, but if you're looking for it just basically to slap you in the face on the charts, you may, in fact, be looking in the wrong places. Especially given just how homogenized and major label-focused a lot of streaming platform algorithms are these days, which, in my opinion, is a way bigger detriment to creativity and the current-day music landscape than whether or not there are bands.

Those are my thoughts, I'm going to leave it there. What are yours? I'm sure you'll leave them down in the comments.

Anthony Fantano, Bands, Forever.