I have all of the Billboard Top 100’s for every year from 1950 to 2009. When i downloaded it i thought that litterally every popular song i’ve heard of would be on there.
Not only are there a lot missing, there’s so so much crap. It turns out bland generic love ballads have sold really well throughout the decades, and genuinely memorable songs are a lot fewer than 100 a year. Not even to mention all the ones that don’t chart. Sure 1957 had Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock, but you know what else it had? Elvis’s Loving You, Elvis’s Love Me, and Jerry Lewis’s “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody”. Cool. Thanks for that, Billboard.
Overall there’s a tremendous survivorhip bias. By definition we only remember the memorable songs, which gives the illusion that everything was memorable.
But also, having grown up in the 2000’s, i really think it’s one of the worst decades for music. So much so that i was into 60’s rock back then, and in the 2010’s i was into the new wave of thrash metal, literally one of the most regressive genres there are. I wasn’t alive for the 80’s, i didn’t like the video games or the movies and didn’t participate in virtually any of the 80’s nostalgia that was trendy at the time, but i did prefer the music to anything my current decade had to offer.