The Day The Riffs Died: How Rock n’ Roll faded from the charts

Look at the list. Packed with Drake, The Weeknd, Post Malone, Billie Eilish, and enough Auto-Tune to drown a Fender amp. Sure, you’ll find Bohemian Rhapsody, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Sweet Child O’ Mine tucked in like old pub regulars no one dares kick out. But they’re relics. Glorious, untouchable, and — most importantly — from another era. The message is clear: when it comes to rock, we’re still listening to the past because the present hasn’t delivered anything louder.

Not a single new rock anthem cracked the top tier.  In some sense, it’s like watching Brazil’s 1970 team morph into Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City: all sleek precision, but where’s the raw flair? Where’s the chaos? The broken strings and bruised egos?

Back to the list. Drake leads the pack with the most entries, shadowed closely by Taylor Swift, who logs an impressive 14 tracks. Ed Sheeran, The Weeknd, Malone, Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, BTS, Travis Scott, and Chris Brown round out the streaming elite.

Genre-wise, it’s a clean sweep for Hip-Hop, Pop, and R&B. The Weeknd practically owns R&B here with nine entries. Billie Eilish, meanwhile, becomes the face of alternative with nine songs—although “alternative” now means sparse production and whispered angst, not guitars and rebellion.

And rock? It shows up more as nostalgia than movement. Imagine Dragons and Maroon 5 get a seat at the pop-rock table with tracks like Thunder and Girls Like You. Harry Styles makes his mark with As It Was and Watermelon Sugar, and Glass Animals break through with Heat Waves. But they’re the exception, not the rule.

Guitars? They weep gently…

Remember when guitars were sexy? Dangerous? When a solo from David Gilmour could make grown men cry and stadiums erupt? When Kurt Cobain made noise beautiful and Freddie Mercury made flamboyance a virtue?

Yeah. Nothing of that sort happened this decade.

Slash hasn’t been replaced. He’s been ignored. There’s no modern equivalent. Unfortunately, not even a mediocre one. The electric guitar went from being a revolutionary weapon to an aesthetic. Now it’s just wall art in a café that sells overpriced lattes.

Even when artists do use guitars — think Olivia Rodrigo’s good 4 u — it seems processed, nostalgic, and often filtered through a Gen Z lens of irony and angst.

The last ten years have flipped the music industry on its head. After years of decline, it’s raking in the moolah. Global recorded music revenues more than doubled between 2014 and 2024, jumping from $14 billion to $29.6 billion, as per reports. That’s a full decade of steady growth, powered almost entirely by one thing: streaming.

Streaming isn’t just the future — it is the industry. In 2024, it made up around 69% of global recorded music revenue, and an even more jaw-dropping 84% in the US. Paid subscriptions alone pulled in $11.7 billion, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all revenue.

Taylor Swift: The accidental rock star

If there’s one artist who arguably best embodies what rock used to be — it’s Taylor Swift. Her DIY ethos, control over her craft, and bold reinventions are pure rock’n’roll spirit. No, I am not a “Swiftie” but really, there hasn’t been a more dominant artist than Swift in the last decade. There used to be a rather funny meme of a crumbling house being depicted as the American economy and the two pillars it was standing on are Swift and Nvidia.

But let’s be real: Swift took on Spotify, re-recorded her masters, and brilliantly weaponised heartbreak into a billion-dollar brand. That’s not just rock’n’roll — it’s perhaps the punkest move of the decade.

She also dominates Apple Music’s list with multiple entries, including Cruel Summer, Shake It Off, Blank Space, Anti-Hero, Wildest Dreams, Lover, and cardigan. Meanwhile, contemporary rock bands — Arctic Monkeys, Foo Fighters, — barely appear, if at all.

Even Coldplay only squeaks in with older hits. And that too is a big surprise. Chris Martin and his crew are one of those rare bands in the last decade to what appeared to have a mass fan following. But look at Apple Music’s list and you feel that they too are epitome of what pop culture has become all about. It’s about being at a Coldplay concert not for singing along the songs but to be at the right place at the right time: Instagram.

If Cobain represented the soul of 1990s angst, Swift is this decade’s confessional juggernaut — emotional, unfiltered, and strangely genre-fluid.

What replaced rock?

You might say hip-hop. Or pop. But really, what replaced rock was vibe.

We now chase atmosphere over attitude. Energy over edge. Who has time for a seven-minute guitar solo when an Instagram Reel needs your attention in 12 seconds? The modern banger doesn’t build. It starts with the drop and ends before your fancy cappuccino finishes frothing. And let’s not talk about what is labelled as a “banger” these days.

Hip-hop adapted. Pop evolved. Rock, for the most part, stubbornly held its ground, like a denim-jacketed uncle refusing to get on Instagram.

Where Pink Floyd once asked “Is there anybody out there?” today’s listeners are already on to the next song. There’s no room for metaphor-laced lyricism and philosophical guitar odysseys. It’s all hooks, filters, and choruses and lo-fi tracks that will give the “feel” on an Insta reel.

Once upon a time, bands were cults — the good kind. Now, I know a good cult sounds oxymoronic. But that’s what they were. They had mythology, feuds, bad tattoos, drug-fuelled you know what, and worse decisions.

There was a time when Freddie Mercury would command an audience of 100,000 with a wave of his hand and a chest-baring onesie? Today, charisma is filtered through Reels and 15-second teasers. Being mysterious doesn’t stream well, I guess.

The last riff

In many ways, Apple Music’s Top 500 is a cultural compass. It doesn’t just tell us what we listened to. It tells us what mattered. And judging by the near-total absence of new rock, guitars stopped mattering, at least to the masses.

So yes, this decade, rock’n’roll died. Not in a dramatic, amplifier-exploding finale. But in a quiet fade-out. A long, slow solo beneath the bass-heavy pulse of trap beats and the shimmering synths — or Blinding Lights (that’s a song by The Weeknd, in case you didn't know — of electro-pop.

In the Apple Music and Spotify era, rock is no longer the dominant cultural force it once was. It lives on in curated playlists, vintage t-shirts, and Quentin Tarantino soundtracks. It thrives in dive bars and perhaps old college reunions. But on the charts or in the ears of the average listener under 30? Rock is background noise.

Freddie’s last note has faded. Cobain’s distortion pedals brutally unplugged. Gilmour’s echoing bends dissolved into the cloud. Rock’n’roll is dead and we all have just streamed past its grave.