Is Rock and Roll Really Dead? Here Are The Numbers

Recently, Spotify came out with an article called "Spotify Ranks the Top 500 Songs for Millennials." The article discussed how Spotify took a look at the numbers to see which songs people ages 18-34 listened to the most. In a world suffocated by popular culture, rock and roll is considered by many to be dead. We saw this article and it got us thinking - how many of these songs are rock songs? Is rock and roll truly dead, or is it still alive in the ears of new generations? We were surprised what we found out.

As it turns out, rock and roll is still very much alive. In fact, of the songs millennials listened to the most, over 20 percent were rock songs. That means one in every five songs millennials love is rock and roll.

Okay, you doubters might say, millennials like rock, but does everyone else? What about Spotify's Top 500 Songs based on ALL users?

Shockingly, the numbers were basically the same. Both Metallica and MGMT made the top 10. Over ten different rock bands made the top 100, with over thirty rock songs. Moreover, in a second article, Spotify consistently labeled rock and roll fans as the most loyal fans of any music genre globally.

This got us curious - how much of the music market out there is rock fans? And what are these rock fans like? We first looked to Google Trends. Google keeps track of every search made, in order to get to their goal - a google searches (for those of you who don't know, yes, google is a number - a very big number). They also keep track of every word of every search, and filter it through Google Trends, a program that compares the popularity of certain words over the course of a specific time period. Here's what Google Trends had to say about rock and roll:

The first Google Trends search we made compared rock and roll and hip hop. The race was a close one, but rock and roll just slightly beat out hip hop on searches in the past year. That shows that although hip hop may be dominating radio stations, rock and roll is still more relevant to listeners online.