The Top 100 Artists of the Seventies* thus far...

Many of our viewers have been checking out The Top 100 Artists of the Seventies* from the start on October 1.  If you just discovered it, now is a good time to catch up before we get too far in.  The series is one of the major music specials, and you will notice that both the write-ups and the number of songs to listen to increase almost daily.  This is to be expected as naturally, the success of the artists is greater as we move from the high numbers on down.  Each artist in this range takes about 20-30 minutes to read their story and listen to their featured songs from the decade.  Before we get too far up the ladder, it will increase to close to an hour and over that as we get closer to #1.

There has already been some great music, and it will get even better.  Unless you're like me, and like nearly all kinds of music, you won't like some artists as much as others.  That's OK, but I do hope you check out at least some of the songs that each artist put out--there's good to be found in everyone.

I want to again repeat that this isn't a ranking of all-time, but rather just the 70's--1970-1979.  Some artists in the special, especially the ones in this initial range, only began to be noticed, or some were towards the end of their careers, perhaps just with two or three successful albums.  Obviously artists such as ZZ Top, Journey, Van Halen, and AC/DC went on to great things in the 80's.  But when you look at just the 70's, this is where they rank in that decade.

Without revealing too much of our patented formula, we considered album sales, the overall strength of each album and how it has stood the test of time, the quality of each track on each album that the artist released in the decade and how those songs have stood up, as well as single sales, airplay, and awards won.  We don't just look at this, the way many similar specials do, but every song the artist puts out.  In short, we put their entire decade under the microscope, examined it, put the appropriate numbers into our formula, and then evaluated their decade in comparison to the other artists of the period.  The result is The Top 100 Artists of the Seventies.

I also want to point out that these rankings are not stagnant even though the decade is of course long since over; rather, the rankings change almost daily.  If the artist earns another sales certification, or airplay of one or more of their songs increases, it can move them up a spot or two almost immediately.  The converse is also true--if their sales and airplay are static, but other artists around them are selling well and receiving airplay, the artist can drop.  This is in effect a "snapshot" of how the artists rank as of October 1.

Here are the links to the artists we have featured so far:

#100:  ZZ Top

#99:  Journey

#98:  Cheap Trick

#97:  AC/DC

#96:  Van Halen

#95:  Jefferson Starship

#94:  Bachman-Turner Overdrive