I think your comment highlights the biggest take-away from the article. Finding statistics to fit your narrative is a trope in journalism, XKCD has even pointed

I think your comment highlights the biggest take-away from the article. Finding statistics to fit your narrative is a trope in journalism, XKCD has even pointed it out: https://xkcd.com/1845/ https://xkcd.com/1845/ I think one way these articles could be more honest is if they did not compare the survivors to all modern top 40 hits, but rather to the most curated selection of culturally-relevant and generation-defining songs. I'm sure any avid listener to any genre/time period could find you 10 songs that will make you reconsider your perhaps preconceived negative opinion on that genre/time period, and 10 songs that will make you continue to generalize the genre/time period as low-quality music. But this is non-trivial and prone to more bias, so we'll probably never see it happen. In the mean time we can continue to use this example of pop-statistics in journalism to remind ourselves to be wary of what we read.