Rock isn’t dead, not by a long shot. Popular music taste expands, contracts, branches into other genres etc. Back in the 80’s it was said the guitar was dead because synths and keyboards were prevalent. But take it to the bank that sooner or later some kids will hear one too many hip hop songs and start a new interest in something else. At some point down the road some kid will pull his grand father’s Lead Zeppelin albums out and be blown away and soon his friends will be wanting it. Always happens and it’s not a bad thing because if the music was popular all the time it would get boring. And when a genre resurfaces it usually has elements of what was in vogue at the time. So it all grows
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It’s been a few years, but I taught music to kids for a little while and also encountered some teen and young adult musicians who were really into Rock. The classic stuff. I was pleasantly surprised, it seemed like a ‘trend’. Even if Rock doesn’t seem viable as commercial genre so much these days, it lives on in the minds and iPod’s of young and old people alike. Rock will never die, as they say.
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But don’t just take my word for it …
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Then there are the soul-uplifting moments like this 8-year old Japanese girl killing it to “Good Times Bad Times”…
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I agree Stan. Go to any random youtube video of 70s-90s classic rock and you will find lots of comments about how lucky the older generation was to have “real music”.
I can’t tell how seriously Paul intended that statement to be, but regardless I agree with it. Its not dead, and not going away, and in 10 years my prediction is that we’ll be right back in a guitar driven era. During my freshmen year of college, a musicology professor said something I’ll never forget. That music cycles and re-incarnates itself. And within those cycles/reincarnations there are subsets of cycles and cycles within each genera. Regardless of wha you consider ‘rock music’, we’ll see some reincarnation of Creed, Nirvana, Sevendust and Pearl Jam. And then some rehash of heavier groups (don’t even know who they are). As far as mainstream… This electronicy phase we’re in right now is gonna get old, and I predict that we’ll be going back to guitar driven stuff a few years down the road. There was a time when rock was at the top of the mainstream charts, and I wouldn’t doubt that it’ll be back there again in time.
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I agree with your data, the trend charts might plot this.
Dont forget the Beatles were turned down by Decca as the famous “guitar bands are dead”…just before Beatlemania hit…EMI was lucky to have went ahead and signed the over-the hill guitar band…
I think the guys name was Dick Rowe?Decca Records… who turned the Beatles down, Guitar bands were dead! ahaha…
i love the comment though…“its just in a coma.” lol…
What does it mean for a genre to be dead?
I think rock will not die, but it will inevitably be transformed and modified in the future. First of all I mean that we well hear in rock music more and more electronic samples, synths and loops, and today we can already see this transformation.
For example, pay attention to Enter Shikari, Bring Me the Horizon of Architects. I like to listen to this bands during picnics with my friends (especially with my bluetooth speaker GBL Go) and I noticed: starting to compose music in a typical metalcore / post-hardcore genres, currently this bands add more and more electronic instruments to their songs.
So, it is just my opinion. But I guess this is inevitable fate of rock music 
Vincent, I think this is a really good thought, but I think there’s a reasonable possibly we’ll go through this electronic sample craze then return to pureist organic roots in the future. Once electronic integration has run its course, what next? Right?
I wonder if it’ll follow the pattern classical music did after the French impressionism movement and move toward non-tonality. Basically you had an era where we’d beat virtuoso piano/violin pyrotechnics and chromatic wizardry to shit. There was literally no way you could push it any further, so the new sound that spawned was the from the Viennese school that challenged the traditional notion of tonal centrism.
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Hey guys…lets take a look at where we are now. What IS rock? Have we run over and over every single drum lick, chord progression, and heavy distortion tone ad infinitum?
What’s next? What else could someone possibly contribute to this genre that hasn’t already been done before? How heavy, dark, ugly, more distorted, and ballsier can stuff get than it already is? Aren’t we seeing bunch of bands that the public used to think of true ‘rock bands’ new being thought of as mere radio pop groups?
The question is whats the next stage or evolution in rock music if not simply dying off?
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ROFLMAO! 
As I bit of a side conversation, I added what I think is a related topic
Isn’t country becoming the new rock and quite possibly emo pop? On a recent trip I decided to finally listen to radio (oh the horror!) and since I don’t listen to country I asked my wife to play me some on the radio.
It has metastasized to a point where I don’t even know what to call it now. If you don’t tell me me this is country, I probably wouldn’t even be able to tag it as such.
There’s still country stuff out there that sound like something’d you associate with country but there’s less of it. The country music scene was shrinking and deteriorating a while back, and the groups (as in labels and shareholders) that own the genre at the mainstream level HAD to do something if they wanted to keep the bills paid.
I see where its crossing hip-hop, RnB, and Rap, but I’m curious what you heard that made you think emo? lol. Do you remember who it was?
Can’t think of who it was…but it was something that would sound if JayZ had a bastard child with Robert Smith 
It had nothing country in it…well maybe the usual country sob story.
Don’t get me wrong - not that I liked country that much, did a trip to Nashville in 2012 where I visited country bar after country bar and for the most part everything in that genre puts me to sleep after 2-3 songs.
It is hilarious how the hardcore kikkers are listening to RnB and rap and thinking they’re country. Going to this year’s rodeo I had a lot of laughs.
It’s corporate country, designed to fill stadiums full of people willing to pay $$$ for merch.
ie. Pop music with mandolins, fiddles and steel guitar.
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Brilliant, we have the corporations to thank for everything…
S
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Even among us there are so many major bands with whom we are completely
unfamiliar or nearly so. I don’t know a single Godsmack song, although I know the name. Lots of people may have heard of Little Feat yet can’t name a song. There is just so much out there, and even old stuff is newly available on youtube- concert footage from the past 50 years- stuff you’ve never seen. So there is all this new depth of trivia material to dig through, and there is all this bite-sized stuff that keeps popping up endlessly to be seen and heard on small cell phone screens and speakers. In a way people are relying on their imaginations more as they are accepting as the norm this lo-fi experience.
So the big guitar rock concert loud stereo experience is mostly imagined and thereby lives on with every classic rock song played in endless rotation on the radio.
And as for the future sound of rock, the traditional human played guitar vs. current synthesized, virtualized guitar phase, I think it is not mutually exclusive. Indeed, quite the opposite. All the midi and sound tools have caused a massive flood in material from unsigned artists, some of it slightly to extremely creative, just piling up until we take the time to check anything out.
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I’d seen that clip a while back, and was in fact just telling a friend about it this afternoon, just a few minutes before you posted this…! cue eerie & weird Theremin music Pretty amazing… thanks for saving me looking it up!
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I mean, it’s not like you can explain it.
You either get it or you doesn’t.
It’s the nature of pop-culture to run in cycles and what isn’t cool now will eventually be cool again. Rock will never die. It might hibernate from time to time… but it will re-awaken… and when it does it will be hungry.
Here’s some talented kids who apparently still believe in Rock and Roll:
and
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