![Which 20th Century decade had the best music? (Infographic) [OC]](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/hqt9v1onzzye1-565x1536.png "Which 20th Century decade had the best music? (Infographic) [OC]")
Which decade of the late 20th Century had the best music? It's a hotly debatable question — the 70s, 80s, and 90s are all within four percentage points of each other at the top of the charts.
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Data Source: CivicScience InsightStore
Visualization Tool: Infogram
Posted by CivicScienceInsights
22 Comments
The 90s are going to get stacked if you don’t include 00’s and 10’s when discriminating by age no?
In the 90’s, nobody thought that the 90’s had the best music.
Didn’t know we stopped making music 25 years ago
The 90s started out great but then fell off a cliff at the end. I’m sure most other decades had something similar but depending on your age what you think of as 90s music can be drastically different than what someone else thinks of as 90s music.
I’d go as far to say that late 90s early 2000s is more of a “decade” than the whole of the 1990s.
I wonder if the younger folk know which decade some old music was made.
Very weird. It seems like the cohort 65+ is totally different from all the other ones. I would have expected more interest in the music of the 50s and 60s in the cohort 55-64, which is not so distant from the other one.
Results exclude any modern music
Easily 60s and 70s. That was the real rock.
The current decade always has the best music because it has its own music plus every decade before it.
90s won in most age groups. Yet altogether 90s is only third
These couldn’t have been equally sized groups to get the result of your pie chart based on your bar graph by age. That doesn’t give any indication of what is “best” when the 55 and up groups outnumber the other 6
You need equal-size age groups. Hell, make it year by year if you have enough data.
It’s hard to root against the 90s for one simple fact: music was the most developed.
By 1990, we had a full-fledge scene for all types of rock, hip-hop, several types of dance music, classical, reggae, ska, jazz, pop on steroids… and the list goes on.
Like, I totally get the 60s and 70s. They had some absolutely great music. The 80s also had a lot of the genres I mentioned above emerge, but not quite fully developed.
By the 90s, you had greats being released of every genre. Even if jazz was a far way from leading the music world, you still had Dizzy Gillespie dropping heat, while you have Tupac topping charts. You simply don’t have that in 1968.
Extremely shocking to me how much the 90s wins out here…
the 70s are objectively correct.
I think so many people choose the 90s as the best decade for music because it came after the worst decade for music, the 80s. The 80s was vapid, over saturated, synth-pop, hair metal, over consumption, brightly colored hair, and hyper drinking and smoking, capitalistic era. The 80s ended up consuming itself ironically enough
TLDR: How old are your parents?
What you see is that people largely think that the music when they were growing up is the best. That bottoms out at 35, where they can’t pick that as an option any more.
Your age ranges are inconsistent. You’ve got a few 5 year intervals, a 7 year interval, and a few 10 year intervals. Just stick to either 5 year intervals for everyone, or 10 years intervals for everyone.
Strong correlation for “the best music was the stuff that came out when I was young”, up until the respondents didn’t actually have the option to respond with the decade of their youth.
And sure 30-34 were alive in the 90s, but they were 2000s kids.
I’d love to talk to the 7% of teenagers that said the 50s.
So people remember their favorite songs by decades of origin? I’m constantly saying, “damn, that was from the 80’s? I guess that time I first heard it was from a cover”