When I was a kid, dating back to even before I developed a liking for rock music and only liked classical, I was under the impression that the most popular music (sales, requests to the radio, concurrent listeners right now, etc) was that stuff called rock 'n roll, or just rock.
This impression continued when I got older and started listening to it myself. It’s what most of the kids listened to and danced to. There were exceptions: the self-styled “cowboy” kids listened to country, I was not alone in appreciating classical, and the black kids mostly listened to something called “soul” although there was some crossover.
At some later point I picked up on the fact that there was this genre of music called “top 40 pop” and that in most of the country it was what sold and was what people danced to and whatnot, and that rock, like country and the others, was a minority genre. And top 40 was sort of a mixture of vapid easy listening and disco.
Since then, I gather that rock has continued to decline in quantitative appeal, top 40 has virtually merged with what used to be “soul” and is now called “r & b” (rhythm and blues, but doesn’t sound like what I think of as “the blues”) as well as the more popped-up version of rap called “hip hop”.
But looking back, was I wrong in thinking that rock was the most popular (in terms as specified above) form of music back when, or was it always something different from and less popular than “top 40” or whatever name it flew under back then?
Are there different charts with different measures of popularity, one of which did crown rock “king” for a duration, whereas “top 40” is a different gauge? I could see how that could be. I’d think classical would rule the charts, for instance, if you asked for compositions that had been most requested, most performed, and most recorded over a one-century period.
