Mr. Natural wrote:
Stuuuuuuu wrote:
OK, as a discussion topic, why would the 100 greatest songs of all time all have been from 1923 or after? I have an answer by the way.
The popularization of the radio and phonograph? I'm guessing that before the '20s the greatest songs were measured by how much sheet music you sold.
Robert Crumb (the author and creator of Mr. Natural) believed music died in the '20s, because that is when we went from actively performing it to passively listening to it.
These lists pretty much only deal in copyrighted music (or books). That's where the real money is for stores, or itunes/kindle now I guess too. I think the public domain cutoff is around 100 years, plus that there are lots of attempts to extend it beyond that. So by making a list of the last century really a list of the past 80 years or so, they give themselves a cushion to sell the stuff before it becomes uncopyrighted.
I was actually talking about this with a friend earlier this week in the context of digital books.