Welcome to the APME Memphis 2025 conference. Here, you’ll be able to register for the conference and update your Sched profile. The conference schedule will be available in late spring 2025. At that time, you can view the schedule and select the presentations you’d like to attend. If you have any questions, please visit our conference website or contact us at conference@popularmusiceducation.org We look forward to coming together as a community June 4–7, 2025.
News reports have indicated that the number of hit songs by bands have declined over time. Possible reasons for this are organized into five theoretical areas: a decline in the popularity of rock, technology allowing for solo projects, social media rewarding individuals, financial incentives being better for solo artists, and record labels not being interested in bands. Within these reasons, a portion of the blame has been pointed toward Spotify and their use of algorithms. A data set of the top 20 songs from Billboard’s annual Hot 100 chart for the years 1961 to 2023 was constructed and ordinary least squares was employed to test whether or not this decline in hits by bands had actually occurred. Next, a two sample t-test and the Mann-Whitney test was used to determine whether Spotify could be to blame. It was found that the number of hit songs by bands has had a statistically significant decline over the years included in the study. However, Spotify is not to blame for this decline as the trend began years before Spotify came to the U.S. There is evidence that points to changes in consumer tastes and preferences as the decline in hit songs by bands correlates to an increase in the number of hits made with collaborations, in particular an increase in hip-hop songs utilizing collaborations.
