Rick Beato

If you go to the top 50 chart right now in the U.S., you have Sabrina Carpenter, you have Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, you have Jimin, you have Chapel Roan, Billie Eilish, Post Malone, Morgan Wallen, Shibuzee, Kendrick Lamar, Tommy Richmond, Hosier.

Zach Bryan, Casey Musgraves, Benson Boone, Teddy Swims.

It's just literally all solo artists.

So next as an experiment, I put together a list of the top 400 artists in ranking of monthly listeners on Spotify.

And I looked to see how many bands on there were created in the last 10 years.

Take a guess, how many?

You might think, oh, I don't know, 25 bands, something like that in the top 400 has to be a lot, right?

It's actually only three.

Only three bands in the top 400 artists on Spotify have formed within the last 10 years.

Three.

The other amazing thing about these bands is that they wrote their own songs.

Now, you would have artists like the Supremes or the Jackson 5 that were part of Motown that have songwriters like Holland Dozier Holland that wrote for the Supremes or the Corporation that wrote for the Jackson 5.

But for the most part, they wrote their own songs.

Now, you would have artists from the 70s and 80s that would actually split off.

For example, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins from Genesis or Sting from The Police that would make their own solo records and have massive hits that they still wrote themselves.

This didn't really change until the late 90s and early 2000s.

This is when you started to have boy bands, for example, Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, that would have these co-writer producers or writer producers that would write their huge hits.

This is where people like Max Martin started to come on the scene.

And this also happened in rock music.

I know because I was part of this thing, being a producer slash songwriter.