What do teen-age and young men listen to nowadays?

Not a big Coldplay guy but went to see them with a friend a few years back. The show was tremendous.

 

My nephews are in college and they listen to a lot of classic rock. Doubt Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, The Doors, etc., will ever go completely out of style for kids of a certain age.

 

Nephew Bro-17, a 4.0++ whiz kid student, likes Pink Floyd (although really only DSOTM; he's never heard WYWH or The Wall. Forget Ummagumma and Piper At The Gates Of Dawn).

He went to a Bruce Springsteen / ESB show with his mom, me and 2 of our other sibs in 2012 and liked it pretty well, but it didn't convert him into a full time Bruce freak.

When the Beatles CD box set came out in 2009 I burned duplicate copies for all the StarSis kids.

They listen to them enough they're familiar with a lot of the songs, but I don't know if any really qualify as Beatlemaniacs.

None of them can really conceive of the 60s-90s idea of sitting around and listening to record albums start to finish.

Up in my attic, I have about 500 record albums packed away in cartons. Later this year I might be moving to a new house with room to do it, and I might set up my old stereo system complete with turntable, tape deck and 3-foot tall wooden speakers and throw them a record party.

 

Two teenagers, and the 17-year-old boy will listen to whatever his friends have. Rap, country and anything in-between. As LTL said earlier, musical taste does not define peer groups so much these days.

One artist my son and my almost-15-year-old daughter both like is Drake. You will hear his music whenever you are near a high school student parking lot.

 

I'm very curious about what will happen to classic rock as time continues to move on. Will people still listen to "IV" and "Sticky Fingers" 50 years from now? What about 200 years from now? What happens when everyone who remembers the Beatles is dead? Because this was my parents' music, it has been a cultural force for as long as I can remember. But as has been noted on this thread, music is background noise for kids now. Like car culture, it's kind of on the way out. Will it be kept alive? Does it even deserve to be kept alive? Maybe just as part of a study of the 20th century?

Ack. It's gut-wrenchingly sad to think about. I went nearly years before starting to confront the idea that the day will come when Bob Dylan just doesn't fucking matter any more.

 

Does anything that was popular 10-12 years ago get played on classic rock stations? Is there ever going to be a format called classic rap?

 

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Even though most of the people who made the music are dead, 1920s/30s /40s classic jazz and big band still has an audience, even if it's much smaller than it once was.

I think the 60s-80s classic rock "canon" has become almost universal in U.S. culture.

Dylan hasn't "mattered" in the sense that anybody really cares what he has to say about current events in about 40 years. But people are still vaguely aware of "Like A Rolling Stone."

 

I think that "classic rock" is confined to music from the '60s and '70s. The formats I encounter are a little looser than that. You'll hear the Black Keys, Mumford & Sons, and the White Stripes alongside Zeppelin and Neil Young, yes.

 

I don't mean in that way. I mean as pop culture.

 

Will come?

Dylan is a nobody now who's shilling IBM's voice butler.

 

Yeah, but the only reason IBM makes the Bob Dylan commercials is that almost everyone of the age group buying computers knows who Bob Dylan is, or is supposed to be.

They know that decades ago, Bob Dylan wrote songs which were supposed to deeply profound and meaningful, and now he's trading one-liners with a computer.

 

OK, he's not a "nobody." He's still a towering cultural figure, and a significant number of people who care about such things realize what he contributed in the '60s and '70s, in particular. Forget everything after 1975 or so. My question is: Will there come a time when Dylan (or Robert Plant or Mick Jagger or Chuck Berry) just don't register any more with enough people to really matter?