Research news of the day! “Millennials know ‘No Diggity.’ But Gen Z? Maybe half of them, at best.”
This is one of the findings from an interesting study published by The Pudding on how well (or not) hit songs from the 1990s are being remembered.
It’s based on more than 3m datapoints collected via a music quiz to find out which tracks have maintained their status, and which have faded from memory with new generations.
Ace of Base’s ‘The Sign’, Will Smith’s ‘Wild Wild West’ and – we’re particularly cross about this – TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ are among the 90s tracks to have faded, while The Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’, Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ and Los Del Rio’s ‘Macarena’ are holding up rather better.
“The trend here is that music has a natural half-life. Find someone 10 to 15 years your junior, and the likelihood that they’ll know your childhood music references is lower than you think,” is the conclusion.
“If you take any present-day hit that’s culturally pervasive, such as “Old Town Road” or “Despacito,” we’d expect that someone born today, in 2020, will probably not recognize it twenty years from now. In short, there’s a good chance they’ll interpret your karaoking of Lizzo, Drake, or the Jonas Brothers in 2040 as an obscure act…”
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