Hospital Radio: Will your favourite band stand the test of time?

In recent years, I have watched music stars from the 1960s steal the show at Glastonbury.

This year it was Sir Rod Stewart and previously it had been Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney. I began to question if today’s stars will still have their music played and appear in concerts 60 years from now?

When we speak of the 60s and 70s, I think we're speaking of lasting musical innovation, and long-term relevance, and I think it is unlikely that such a step change will ever take place again. The landscape today appears to be more evolution rather than revolution. 

The 1960s were a transformative period in music and culture. Artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones, didn’t just produce hit songs, they redefined what popular music could be. The new generation started to ease the music of their parents out of the pop charts, while parents moved to the growing medium of television for their entertainment.

The music of the 60s became deeply intertwined with a generation, who truly believed they could change the world, and their music was at the heart of social and political revolutions, influencing public opinion on war, civil rights, and personal freedom. 

Today's music faces a different landscape to music from the 60s.  Now we are moving into an era with the threat of AI looming over it. Is there a danger that music will be produced like a sausage machine, and create music un-associated with characters, but with a digital mastering monster. 

Today stars have massive cultural influence, and many are socially engaged but music, like life, is generally more fragmented, digital, and fast moving. With streaming platforms, songs and artists rise and fall in popularity at lightning speed. While these streaming mediums can allow more artists to find audiences, it also makes it harder for any single artist to dominate the scene in the way 60s icons did. 

So, will songs by today’s artists still be played in 60 years from now? Part of the reason 60s music feels timeless to me, is because it has been preserved, studied, and developed over decades. It benefits from nostalgia and from being associated with pivotal moments in history.

In short, some of today’s pop music may endure in the way that 60s music has, but the context has changed. While the 60s produced towering figures in music history, today’s stars are navigating a more complex and fragmented environment. 

Music today exists in a radically different ecosystem. There is the Streaming Culture and maybe abundance breeds disposability. With 100,000+ tracks uploaded daily, it’s harder for any one song to dominate the cultural imagination. We’re guided by playlists and moods, not movements and the audiences are more fragmented. These days TikTok can launch a hit but also burn it out in weeks. 

Yet, that doesn’t mean today’s music can’t endure artists like Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé are crafting bodies of work with real depth and cultural significance. Genres like hip-hop and electronic music have matured into rich traditions with their own legends and lore. There is much be admired of the stars of today.

So will todays music last the test of time? Endurance isn’t just about quality—it’s about context, narrative, and emotional. Music lasts when It captures a moment and transcends it. It’s almost always tied to personal or collective memory. It is quite often something new and fresh

Longevity may be harder to achieve, but we at Torbay Hospital Radio, we are part of a broadcasting family and hope we can help to preserve the place of music in our society. We play music from all genres from jazz and blues to pop, and everything in between. If you want to Listen to a diverse selection of music, listen online at https://torbayhospitalradio.com/listenlive/