![]() On the other hand, you could download Ableton, shut your bedroom door and get creating straight away. If you go the band route, you need to find bandmates with a similar vision, you need expensive instruments and equipment, and you need to get out on the road to hone your craft. “If you’re young and inspired to become a musician, you face a choice. So much is done in bedrooms these days, so you’re more likely to be by yourself.”īen Mortimer, co-president of Polydor Records, says that cost is more of an issue for artists than for labels. When I first met the 1975, they were all friends meeting in a room to make noise. “It’s more likely now that a kid will make music in isolation because of technology. ![]() The problem is, he says, there aren’t that many around. “I’m desperate to find a really young band that I can help develop.” “We’re actively trying to sign bands,” he says. Not so, says Jamie Oborne, whose Dirty Hit label has found success with bands (the 1975, Wolf Alice) and solo artists (Beabadoobee, Rina Sawayama). One theory is that major labels avoid bands because solo artists are cheaper and easier to handle. Rock and pop now exist in different spheres – even the biggest bands struggle to crack the streaming-driven Top 20 – but bands are on the back foot within alternative music itself. Music has been compartmentalised a lot more.” It could be anything next: R&B, alternative rock, whatever. “We did Top of the Pops with Amerie and the Scissor Sisters. “Bands were alongside pop acts on the radio and on TV,” says frontman Paul Smith. In the era of sales-based charts and Top of the Pops, they had eight Top 40 hits. So what happened?Īrt-pop band Maxïmo Park broke through in 2005, during the huge post-Strokes boom in rock bands. The album charts are still regularly topped by bands thanks to loyal fanbases who still buy physical formats – such as Mogwai, Architects and Kings of Leon in recent weeks – but not since 2016 has one hung on for a second week. Only one band, the Lathums, appeared on the BBC’s annual tastemaking Sound of … longlist this year, which is not unusual: bands haven’t been in the majority since 2013. That’s the 1975, Haim, alt-J, Rudimental, Bastille and Tame Impala, and the last of those is effectively a solo project. Of those that have emerged in the past decade, only half a dozen have headlined either Coachella, Reading/Leeds, Latitude, Download, Wireless or the main two stages at Glastonbury. Of course, radio and streaming are dominated by pop, rap and dance music but festival lineups don’t point to a golden age of bands, either. In Spotify’s Top 50 most-played songs globally right now, there are only three groups (BTS, the Neighbourhood, and the Internet Money rap collective), and only six of the 42 artists on the latest Radio 1 playlist are bands: Wolf Alice, Haim, Royal Blood, Architects, London Grammar and the Snuts. ![]() There are duos and trios, but made up of solo artists guesting with each other. Two are the Killers and Fleetwood Mac, with songs 17 and 44 years old respectively, while the others are the last UK pop group standing (Little Mix), two four-man bands (Glass Animals, Kings of Leon), two dance groups (Rudimental, Clean Bandit) and two rap units (D-Block Europe, Bad Boy Chiller Crew). Right now, there are only nine groups in the UK Top 100 singles, and only one in the Top 40. Whichever metric you use, the picture is clear.
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