For songs released in 1991, these are the top 5 songs on Spotify:

Time travel back to 1991, and countless songs were more popular: End Of The Road (Boyz II Men), Baby Got Back (Sir Mix Alot), Save The Best For Last (Vanessa Williams), and I'm Too Sexy (Right Said Fred). In 1991, no one would reasonably believe Smells Like Teen Spirit would be the cultural touchstone of the 1990s.

It’s not just 90s music – it’s every decade. Our biggest stars, against all odds, often fade from culture.

In 1961, Bobby Lewis’s Tossin’ and Turnin’ spent 7 weeks at #1. For all intents and purposes, Bobby Lewis was the Beyonce of 1961. Yet, have you heard of it? Do you know who Bobby Lewis is?

Meanwhile, Etta James’ debut album dropped the same year, with At Last peaking on Billboard at #68. Music historians will regard Bobby Lewis as a pioneer in rock and roll and R&B, yet whatever led to Tossin’ and Turnin’s popularity in 1961 has faded over time. His music, for countless reasons, didn’t persevere in the same way as Etta James’.

If you grew up in the 60s, Paul McCartney is a fucking god. So is Bobby Lewis. And The Beach Boys. And Van Morrison. And the Rolling Stones. It’s an endless list of artists who represent the formative years of our youth. We can’t expect future generations to remember every successful musician.

I can't name more than 3 artists from the 1940s. Consider any Paul McCartney-equivalent of the 40s, like Bing Crosby, and I can’t name one of his songs (excluding Christmas albums).

For most successful artists, time is unkind. We laud their albums with Grammys, perfect reviews, and platinum/gold certification. Yet, it's far more noteworthy to survive five decades.

That's a feat only a few artists can accomplish. For a track that charted on Billboard during the 1970s, 75% have fewer than 500,000 plays today. Essentially, zero cultural relevance. For context, the top 10 songs from 1960s on Spotify all have well above 15 million plays. It’s a power law– a big drop-off once you're outside the top.

I look at today’s biggest stars – Beyonce, Drake, Taylor Swift – I can’t imagine a world without them. But there’s some reality, 50 years from now, where Drake has the same fate as Bobby Lewis, and some underground artist, like Lana Del Rey, unexpectedly represents 2010s pop music.

This pattern exists in every medium: books, movies, art, etc. Neil Gaiman was once asked how it’s possible that "50 Shades of Grey has sold more copies than the number of books Ray Bradbury sold in his lifetime.”

His response:

But when their day is done, mostly those kind of books drift back into the void, and go, if not out of print, then back into a world where nobody quite knows why they sold that many copies any more. (Do you know who Gilbert Patten was? He sold about 500 million books in his lifetime…)

Meanwhile, Ray Bradbury sold quite a lot of books in 1956, and quite a lot of books in 2006 (Fahrenheit 451 alone has sold over 5 million copies), and he found his readers for his books and his stories in every year. And I’ll wager a hundred years from now he’ll still be read…

99% of culture will fade. I can’t lament the youth’s disregard for my favorite artists. It’s no slight that they aren’t remembered. Maybe I’m arrogant about the respect that they deserve. Perhaps I’m wrong about these songs. Perhaps they weren't classics after all. At least time thinks so.