Now in the sense of bands.. I mean the traditional sense. Interesting topic to bring up and has been a trend for many years.

Clearly the UK public love a band.. just look at Oasis on their current mega tour. The every year you can have the a mix of bands from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s selling out stadiums and headlining festivals.

But with the album chart practically a token gesture at this point and the huge trend for solo artists.. just where have all the bands gone? The current trend of music seems to create stars for 2-3 yeards (if that) before the next artist comes along. Can't think of any band post pandemic who have made a gigantic mainstream breakthrough. possibly Fonatines D.C. but it really did make me think where is the next generation of festival and stadium bookings coming from if the TikTok trend continues.

Wet Leg, Wunderhorse and The K's all have pretty big followings from what I've seen, all breaking through post-lockdown: can only see the latter two getting bigger. I would say ticket sales are a much bigger indicator of a band's success nowadays. The fanbase can sort of be seen from the albums chart albeit for one week only... That being said there's no telling whether or not we'll have a "gigantic" band in the future.

Edited Saturday at 18:362 days by gasman449

I doubt there will be another household band for a long time (I can be proven wrong) but if you don't care about large-scale popularity: The Last Dinner Party could do something big next album, The 1975 are still around and um... Sleep Token hitting it big with their latest album.

Bands are definitely not as hip in the pop music / casual spectrum of things for a while, compared to solos.

Edited Saturday at 18:552 days by AllStarBySmashMouth

In an edition of The Rest is Entertainment from last July (the podcast with Richard Osman & Marina Hyde), this came up. There have been just three weeks in the first half of the 2020s where a band was #1 in the singles chart. That compares to 141 in the first half of the 1990s.

Only one of those was an active, actual band at the time and that was Little Mix. The other two were The Beatles and the Radio 1 Live Lounge Allstars.

They still sell albums and tour well though, so for whatever reason (it not being as much of a sell compared with a solo artist for a record label) bands generally aren't shifting singles. If they are, they're not charting very high either.

I don’t want to get political but nowadays most bands are pretty middle classy and if you look at Oasis it just seemed more authentic rather than a bunch of guys who can sit around for years and use connections to get in doors like say the 1975

1 hour ago, Liam Sota said:

I don’t want to get political but nowadays most bands are pretty middle classy and if you look at Oasis it just seemed more authentic rather than a bunch of guys who can sit around for years and use connections to get in doors like say the 1975

I don’t think it’s anything to do with politics. The music industry has always been full of nepotism, whether you’re a band or an artist. Can argue that up until recently that was more artists than bands, but not sure I agree too much.

Even with some of the acts listed above, I just don’t see it. If you think of the huge nostalgia wave and cultural impact I don’t think we’ve had a band for a while. Even a band like Sleep Token- they’re never going to headline Glastonbury on the pyramid stage.

Huge gap for a band which has some form of cross cultural appeal. It is weird as like you say, evidently this music is still popular but seemingly it’s nowhere near the charts, and thus nowhere near the mainstream!

Pains me to say but I feel it is just hard in a diversified media environment for a new big band to really break out into the mainstream, at least in the sense of making pop music. Much harder than solo artists. I mean, bands will continue selling out stadiums here and there but it might be that newer bands don't in the end.

For those that care for that type of music, there will be bands that everyone within that space knows, still. Bring Me The Horizon are headlining Leeds/Reading. Sleep Token I constantly hear about. But then with diversified media, that can still be really huge in the sense of being known by a large number of people despite making no impact on charts.

Also will vary by country, if Linkin Park's tour dates are anything to go by - another band that recently had a fairly successful era - they had 5 tour dates in Germany but 1 in the UK this year, so I went to Germany to see them - for whatever reason Germany was considered to have much more demand for them. Could well be that our media landscape just isn't pushing bands as much right now.

14 minutes ago, Iz 🌟 said:

Pains me to say but I feel it is just hard in a diversified media environment for a new big band to really break out into the mainstream, at least in the sense of making pop music. Much harder than solo artists. I mean, bands will continue selling out stadiums here and there but it might be that newer bands don't in the end.

For those that care for that type of music, there will be bands that everyone within that space knows, still. Bring Me The Horizon are headlining Leeds/Reading. Sleep Token I constantly hear about. But then with diversified media, that can still be really huge in the sense of being known by a large number of people despite making no impact on charts.

Also will vary by country, if Linkin Park's tour dates are anything to go by - another band that recently had a fairly successful era - they had 5 tour dates in Germany but 1 in the UK this year, so I went to Germany to see them - for whatever reason Germany was considered to have much more demand for them. Could well be that our media landscape just isn't pushing bands as much right now.

We have good bands - Sleep Token, Bring me the Horizon, Wolf Alice, Fontaines D.C - but none of these acts have crossed over to the mainstream - compare that to the 00s - Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, The Killers etc. be unlikely for any of them to have a hit single now (ok maybe Coldplay) but will sell out stadiums and can headline any festival and be a huge draw. I class Linkin Park as a stdium band, they are pretty huge.

You know but looking back at these huge nostalgia tours - Oasis. Blur, Fleetwood Mac (not gonna happen but you know), Guns n Roses.. feels like we have a massive musical cultural gap with longevity! I feel you could possibly apply this to even solo artists as well to some degree.

I think Fontaines are there. But you don't have to look at the singles charts to see what's popular, look at the albums chart.

2 hours ago, Bjork said:

I think Fontaines are there. But you don't have to look at the singles charts to see what's popular, look at the albums chart.

But this is kind of my point - the album chart barely gets any traction or sales with streaming. And half of the current albums chart is dominated by bands from the 70s and 90s! Clearly the public still love a band and we have had massive bands in the past, but there's noone since the mid 00s that have really hit that giant spot. The 1975 possibly, but as much as I like them, I'd question whether they could do a multi date stadium tour.. certainly could probably do Dua Lipa's level though.

Fontaines D.C.'s album actually has stuck around in the chart with consistent streaming though - they haven't had any huge singles yet but 'Starburster', 'Favourite' and 'Bug' have all been sleeper hits with long legs, and they did finally crack the top 40 albeit briefly with 'It's Amazing To Be Young'. I think their next album could produce a properly big mainstream hit if they play their cards right.

(Still, slim pickings but they're probably the best we have for a modern 'mainstream' band, them or Sleep Token but I think they've moreso just amassed a very big cult fanbase)

When it comes right down to it, there's a number of factors at play as to the lack of massively successful bands. Dwindling number of grassroots music venues is one thing (you can't let a week go by these days without news of another one hitting the wall, and that has wider implications than just for regional and local scenes). The industry's apparently undying obsession with internet virality, and expecting artists to be everything that artists expected to have done for them when being signed to a major ten or fifteen years ago i.e. marketing, social media manager / content creator.

What major label deals there are these days are mostly but not all 360° deals, meaning the artist sees even less revenue from outside of music sales. Then you've got touring costs getting so astronomical these days, making it almost impossible for up and coming bands to make any money at all from gigging and playing live, some barely breaking even in some cases. Whilst not all of these factors are totally insurmountable, is it any wonder there's very few bands making it truly big these days?

19 hours ago, Rooney said:

Even with some of the acts listed above, I just don’t see it. If you think of the huge nostalgia wave and cultural impact I don’t think we’ve had a band for a while. Even a band like Sleep Token- they’re never going to headline Glastonbury on the pyramid stage.

There's another issue with that though, and I think you're more than likely correct, but Glastonbury has been notorious for decades for refusing to put Rock, and particularly, Metal acts on the bill regardless of how much they like to claim to represent all the contemporary performing arts. Sure, they'll toss the odd booking in the direction of Metallica or GNR and both went down very well but they'll shy away from putting more than a token gesture on the bill. You'll find a decent number of Jazz or World Music acts on the bill and yet their sales in the UK are dwarfed by Metal and Rock. You only have to look at the recent stadium tours by Iron Maiden and Slayer to see that they can still sell out stadiums - Iron Maiden sold 75,000 tickets and Slayer - a band not noted for big hit singles - sold 45,000 per show. The there's the Black Sabbath farewell show too, and other stadium sized bands like Rammstein, Stereophonics or Green Day

If Glastonbury, for example were more open minded Sleep Token, Ghost or BMTH could easily headline the Pyramid, given that in the past acts with a equal or lower popularity have.

The problem isn't that Rock and Metal have lost popularity or mainstream pontential, it's that the mainstream media began shying away from those genres in the 2000s as they chased being cool and trendy and in essence began dictating that people didn't listen to it. First Radio One and the like stopped playing it on daytime scheduling (except the very lightweight stuff like Killers or Kings of Leon) and then the broader public forgot there was more there, they whole thing began snowballing and now newer bands are finding it harder to be heard.

Rock is like Bindweed, you can cut the top off and starve it of light but underneath it's still there thriving away and will appear again and again just as healthy even if some people don't want to look at it.