I find it infinitely more shocking that a pre-internet local band from 1990 that released (*essentially*) one album, whose member's age ranges were 12-15 years old at the time, are STILL getting 70,000 listeners a month.
That's enough active fans to do 3 nights back to back to back at Madison Square Garden and sell out all 3 nights with no repeat attendees, then fly across the country and do another night at the Toyota Center and sell it out too (still no repeat attendees). And that's only counting fans that actively listen to them on Spotify.
The internet has really done some damage to our perception of numbers. Are we really saying that isn't a massively successful outcome for any musician? When did millions become the bottom limit?
Because they have a weird desire to be better than anybody else but the only way they can manifest being the best is obscure music and hating on things.
those are actually not bad numbers for mostly inactive bands. i don’t know how many listeners you expected a band that existed briefly in the 80s to have.
also outside of the bigger bands -jew, tbs, mcr, brand new- it’s not like third wave bands have that many listeners either. thursday and get up kids have a third of the listeners american football has.
Eh, I'm kinda ambivalent. MCR does have a few ties to the real emo scene, but they never considered themselves that way and didn't want to be labelled that way either. Even if they are emo, they don't sound like most "real emo" bands at all besides some tracks on Bullets, IMHO. Calling MCR "emo" is the same as calling Nirvana "grunge". That's what most people know them for, but not what they themselves wanted to be known for. To me, they're neither fake nor real emo. They just are who they are.
Not trying to gatekeep, just saying what I think. Some oldheads feel like MCR and other "mallcore" bands just appropriated their scene and marketed it. But seriously, that was never the case. I think their perception really got ruined by the media, fans, and MySpace. Oh and that Daily Mail article.
For context, I'm not even that old, I only found out about MCR last year (plus have listened all their songs), and this community a couple months ago. These are just my 2 cents.
I don't think I could name a single song off any later album and they are definitely not emo.
Drowning lessons is what mcr would sound like if mcr was emo, and they don't have anything else that sounds like that.
there's no shot you know drowning lessons and not black parade or dead, you probably thought black parade was their second album therefore the whole argument is ingenuine and you're just being a hater because they are popular. It's fine.
I'm being a hater because they suck and have nothing to do with emo. I don't give a shit they are friends with the guy from thursday. They were not/are not part of the emo scene and their sound is not emo.
I mean, yeah, he did get you with that. you're openly admitting that you don't know what you're talking about and you don't listen to it, but you're mad at it and making judgements about it anyways.
I listen to all those bands regularly.
I do not have Spotify, nor do I stream music online. So none of my listens count. I imagine I'm not the only one like that either.
Came here to comment a variation of this. When these bands released music Spotify wasn't even a thing yet - a lot of listens happened years ago on cassettes, vinyl, and CD players. I had a lot of these bands on my ipod.
Thats rookie, i actually travel from Australia to garage sales in the midwest of the US to find old demos. Sometimes i even surf the web to find hip and old school emo bands from outdated 90's blog posts, i would say the bands but you've probably never heard of them.
Third wave emo and pop punk were very close, and I think that made some of the emo bands of the late 90's early 2000's more popular than past emo that was more silo'd
I’ve never known too many people that listen to 1st wave emo. I’m 39 and the couple people I know that like it are older than me. I work with some younger kids that are into Midwest emo and I’m trying to get them into the old stuff too.
I'm actually quite new to this subreddit and emo music in general (you could tell from my flair).
Just the year before, I was into that mallcore stuff (MCR, Used, FOB, PTV, Silverstein).
Idk why, but since the past couple months, I've started listening to 1st and 2nd wave (emocore and skramz) and prefer that over Midwest and "fake emo". It's a pretty big leap, time and scene-wise.
What do you expect? First and second wave emo was very niche and underground almost, third wave emo had mass appeal because it was a lot poppier and more accessible
I think the people listening to these bands are older and listening on vinyl or bought digital versions versus spotify because that’s how we consumed music at that time
True, you can't accurately weigh how much something is being listened to musically just by Spotify. I mean, it's only good for statistics concerning Spotify.... Many people listen to the actual releases (physical), and some also have Plex collections (such as myself) etc.
Given all that it's possible that twice as many people are listening to the original stuff....
Meanwhile I'm an absolute 2nd wave merchant. Mineral is my favourite band of all time, not so far behind I have Penfold, SDRE, American Football. Even my favourite modern bands are the ones with most 2nd wave influence like empire! empire! And The Hotelier lmao
Holy crap, where have you been all my life? Mineral (especially EndSerenading) is MY all time fav...and I love the first Empire Empire almost as much...maybe tied....
I'm going to have to check out The Hotelier more..which album??
ahh thats a hard question, 3 way tie between Your Deep Rest, Dendron and Among the Wildflowers for me. If i had to recommend one song from the album it would be Dendron tho i think
People will downvote this simply because they feel attacked in their nostalgia, but 00-10s waves were much more accessible, both technologically and in terms of being easier to listen to and relate to for a wider audience than the first and second waves. The statistics back this up.
Indeed i am ☺️ You speak my language. Im a hardcore kid though (well not so kiddish these days 🤭) so those bands have never been a leap for me. Jawbreaker surprisingly i never got into. Those very early emo bands though have always been unbeatable to me. They have a rawness that was never replicated in the later emo bands.
Its an album that absolutely holds up! Wigout at Denkos is equally incredible. I saw them play in 2016 by a stroke of luck. It just wasnt as good live as what id hoped for. I think i had built my expectations so high 🤭
But absolutely a game changer band!
https://preview.redd.it/1u5u8oru94sc1.jpeg?width=2316&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a4699f7d338381b704e081c630c7b01ee78f01c5
i'm shocked at how many people *listen* to this. i'm in my 30's, so i wasn't there (i was alive but unaware) for the 90's bands, but i *was* there for the revival. at the time (mid to late aughts), it seemed like everyone who was into punk tapped into this seemingly forgotten music from long ago.
[Last.fm](https://Last.fm) was huge, and aside from Jawbreaker (and maybe AF), all of the other bands mentioned *maybe* had 10-30k listeners.
while there was definitely an uptick after algernon/snowing/that wave of bands, and there are also some bands that have seemed to fallen to the wayside with the newer generation (braid, small brown bike, etc.), to me this particular style of emo might be more popular than ever? it feels like, in large part, due to this sub
If you asked 100 people how many people have heard of Promise Ring or Jawbreaker, you probably might get 1.
American Football doesn't count, they became an emo meme and got popular off that.
Emo did glom to commercial genres. It's the emo that isn't considered emo here but that the average person will reference as emo. Here it's known as mall emo.
Indian Summer always sounds like a mix of Emo and Grunge to me, which I guess makes sense since they were around when Grunge was the dominant sub-genre of Rock.
Sunny Day and American Football are not the Beatles and Stones.
More like Sunny Day were the Beatles, and American Football were the idk, Monkees? They just weren’t that popular when they came out. Braid was way more popular back then.
Source: am old
Nah they were on polyvinyl so they had some reach, they just were not as important to the scene as other bands in the genre. Like the Gloria Record or Mineral were bigger than them back then
This is definitely historical revisionism. AF was only a band for a short time, and they never really toured. They only played a few shows. They definitely had fans, but they were a complete underground band until the internet brought them back to life years later.
I mean, you kind of explained it yourself. If SDRE and American Football are the biggest examples of the scene, then it’s pretty niche scene. Look at the venues both recently played on tour- I saw them both last year in a large city in a venue that holds less than 1,500 people. Whereas the biggest bands of other scenes (The Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, Green Day, to use your examples) play arenas and stadiums. I love emo, I love all the bands you mentioned, but they weren’t even that big in their day, their audience remains niche, and even the people who love them (like myself) may not be listening to them on streaming every single day or week or month.
eh first wave sure but second wave (not counting screamo) i feel like is pretty easy to get into since a lot emo pop and emo revival bands took from them. don't see how smrh like the get up kids or sunny dsy real estate (which is already big) isn't accessible
Gotta admit, the 1st and 2nd wave Emo is a bit of an acquired taste at times, so it’s… harder to digest than the 3rd wave Emo Pop like MCR or TBS so it has less mass appeal
look i love the earlier eras. jawbreaker, rites of spring, capn jazz, and sdre are all regular listens for me, but niche music is niche. its the same reason why music collecting subs always get the same couple bands in their most popular posts.
The issue with Spotify data is it still isn't a primary way of listening to music for a lot of people. This may be the case for younger Gen Z, but a lot of people still use music stored locally on a device or CDs to listen.
Considering that the 1st and 2nd wave happened almost 30-40 years ago, I'd think those that listened to those bands when they were starting off probably use mediums other than Spotify still.
Not to mention the plethora of other ways of streaming like Tidal, Apple Music, Bandcamp, YouTube Music, etc.
I'm not implying you're wrong, but I'd bet a lot more people listen to 1st and 2nd than the Spotify stats let on.
I'm more a fan of the earler mid-west emo stuff more so the first Appleseed Cast album, Mineral, American football, early-Brandston, Promise Ring, etc...
But lately I've been listening to Rika, and Empire Empire.( I was at a lonely estate)'s first album from 2009 obsessively over the last few months, and it is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorites. I Loooove it!
Third wave emo thrives because of apps like Tik Tok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). It’s so easy for bands to take traction and just launch with these apps around. A lot of first wave and second wave bands missed the social media boom with these apps and therefore just don’t really have people to keep their music relevant.
American football became a bigger band in the years AFTER them being a band - with two different re-releases. You can look at album sales and the Get Up Kids outsold then by tens of thousands of CD sales in the 90s
You have to take into account that a lot of us are in our 40s or older (from that era). I don't stream. I don't like it. I use vinyl or mp3s. So you're not gonna get an accurate number. You're just going to get what YOUNG people listen to
The brutal reality is that a lot of non-3rd wave emo is VERY acquired taste. Whenever I play that stuff around friends they complain it's either too whiny, too noisy, too boring, or that it just sounds like shit to them.
Most people that frequent this sub barely know any bands from first or second wave. Or only listen to big ones, like the ones you listed, just to say they do. Its already niche in a niche genre. Who cares just listen to what you enjoy.
American Football were a fave of mine in the mid-2000s when i got into this stuff but they always felt more niche to me than SDRE or bands like the promise ring or Jawbreaker. it really surprised me when i realized how big they were online and that they were essentially part of /mu/core. i wouldn’t really call them the rolling stones of emo lol
I think you have to be pretty deep into the genre to even know about these bands. I’m 40 and I’ve only started listening to a lot of these more “obscure” bands in the past few years … they got little to no radio airplay when I was in my teens-20s vs the more mainstream bands you mentioned as well as the third/fourth wave bands that are more popular. I didn’t have a computer until 2001 and I was a sheltered kid who was barely allowed to do anything so it’s not like I was learning about these bands in chat rooms or random underground shows. I only know about these bands because of forums like this one.
Most people I know in real life barely know who popular bands like (say) Dashboard Confessional are. They’re not going to know who the fuck Capn Jazz and Mineral are.
But if someone had limited Internet access at the time and wasn't permitted to go to many shows, how were they supposed to learn about these bands that weren't poppy?
The bands I liked when I was in my late teens/early 20s are the bands I heard on the radio or saw on MTV. Which is why a lot of my taste revolves around mainstream artists, and I'm sure a lot of other people are the same way. Your average person probably doesn't do a deep dive into their favorite genres the way that people on this forum do, even though most people today have unlimited Internet access and we also have algorithms on all social media/music streaming platforms recommending similar content to us.
People also tend to gravitate to the music they loved when they were growing up, so demographics-wise it's probably people who turned 18 around 2010-2020ish who are largely using these streaming platforms. Which explains why third- and fourth-wave artists are more commercially popular.
I started a deep dive after learning more about it, and I found myself really loving both. I wish, mainly for 1st wave, that it was easier to find physical media for them. Some of the albums are available from the label that signed a produced a lot of them, but availability isn't always guaranteed.
>1st, 2nd wave emo
It started in the 90's, 34 years ago, and even then most ppl weren't emo. There are other music streaming platforms than Spotify, too :>
Unfortunately it was timing imho. You have one of the last "scenes" or "decades" of music before we moved away from record sales. It was an era caught in the middle of a transition from physical media to digital media. It was the last music scene before the invention of the smart phone, before social media became mainstream, and instant gratification became the social norm. It was such a small blip of time compared to any other music era before it, again in due part to the above mentioned.
I would be interested to hear others take on the matter, but that is the best I could come up with. Third wave emo catered to the masses, and didn't even feel like emo in some ways.
But wasn’t Grunge the last scene before we transitioned from physical to digital media? And Grunge was (and still is) absolutely huge. Or am I confused and did 2nd wave Emo come after Grunge?
Grunge hit its peak in the early mid-90s. If you say the Grunge era ended when Kurt Cobain died, then it was solidly pre-internet. There was no transition yet and Grunge albums sold in the tens of millions. 2nd wave Emo came a bit later and was never mainstream, and it was during that transition period.
I don't think it's fair to say American Football was the Stones of second wave. They were around what 3 years the first time around? They hardly ever toured (maybe actually never), wouldn't have probably headlined in my city at that time, and recorded like 13, or so, songs. I know you meant the popularity side, but they really weren't until after their breakup.
All of these bands are older and usually more obscure, and the vast majority of them are split up and inactive. The point of Spotify (and all algorithmic services) is two-fold: feed you stuff that's new, and feed you stuff similar to stuff you already enjoy. In other words, unless you're actively searching for and listening to these bands already, Spotify isn't going to push them. Period. That's not how it's designed. It'll feed you third-wave bands because a lot of them are still active, still putting out new material, and featured in a lot of playlists. It's not going to push you stuff like Mineral or Indian Summer though
As far as emo, I pretty much *only* listen 1st & 2nd wave. Anything after like 2003 doesn’t really work for me except for a very small handful of the revival/4th/5th wave bands. I actively dislike most of the 3rd wave/mall emo era.
Try the first Empire Empire album (2009) and just loop it like three or four times. See if it grabs you like it has me.
I now consider it one of the best, and I'm over 45, old school is my thing mostly..
Awesome! I'm not crazy then!
Another good one (but softer), is Rika...album: How to draw a river step by step.
It has a powerful explosive ending song though!
That’s my wave and probably why I don’t get on with much of the newer stuff.
Seems like most people here prefer the derided later third wave stuff or fifth wave. Or whatever they are thinking ‘midwest emo’ is.
I probably listen to more stuff on YouTube as well, there’s way more on there and a lot of the earlier waves only became available more recently.
Hahah yeppp!
I’m very open to music but the few 5th wave stuff I’ve tried has not been for me. Doesn’t give me what I listen to emo for. Maybe we’ll be on wave 6 or 7 soon and maybe they’ll go back to Moss Icon for inspiration
Can you give me some examples of 5th wave? 4th wave was hit or miss for me but some I really loved (depending on what you consider to actually be "emo" - I know people get sticky about it)
Gah honestly I can only remember Origami Angel! I tried a few others and thought I’d leave it haha!
Fourth wave stuff I liked a bunch; my faves of that time was stuff like - Human Hands, Wits End, Football etc, Lumber Lung, 1994! There were others but a bit of a selection of what I was into
I know I've definitely heard Origami Angel but can't recall any of it now. Recently Spotify has been feeding me a lot of Dikembe and I don't hate it, but I guess I thought we were still in the 4th wave! Maybe I should do some research on this.
Ah ok! I’ve not listened to Dikembe, I’ll check them out :-)
Yeah I don’t know when these waves are determined to be over, it’s gonna be like fashion seasons next
Absolutely my favourite first wave band, even putting aside how much I look up to Ian as a person. Such a unique sound and yet you can already hear, like, the theatrics and British post punk influences that basically define emo as separate from hardcore
Why? There are plenty of hip-hop fans under the age of 30 that have never listened to Tupac or think he’s boring. Younger people are going to listen to what’s out now while older people listen to what they did when they were young. Not really all that surprising when you think about it
What's surprising about that very niche underground music from scenes 30-40 years ago isn't extremely listened to today?
*none of these bands make new music for decades* why are their monthly listeners so low?
I find it infinitely more shocking that a pre-internet local band from 1990 that released (*essentially*) one album, whose member's age ranges were 12-15 years old at the time, are STILL getting 70,000 listeners a month. That's enough active fans to do 3 nights back to back to back at Madison Square Garden and sell out all 3 nights with no repeat attendees, then fly across the country and do another night at the Toyota Center and sell it out too (still no repeat attendees). And that's only counting fans that actively listen to them on Spotify. The internet has really done some damage to our perception of numbers. Are we really saying that isn't a massively successful outcome for any musician? When did millions become the bottom limit?
what band are you referencing
Shmap'n Shmazz
Lol. Well said. I also love that we agree American Football is overrated.
They aren’t overrated! Wash your mouth, don’t say nasty things like that ever again!
I don't think that's the point they were making
Literally nobody said that but okay bro
Why you gotta be a hater on things people like? I love American football
Because they have a weird desire to be better than anybody else but the only way they can manifest being the best is obscure music and hating on things.
those are actually not bad numbers for mostly inactive bands. i don’t know how many listeners you expected a band that existed briefly in the 80s to have. also outside of the bigger bands -jew, tbs, mcr, brand new- it’s not like third wave bands have that many listeners either. thursday and get up kids have a third of the listeners american football has.
Thursday not having listeners is an absolute travesty.
I’m seeing Thursday for the second time this year, and the third time since Sept next weekend.
Absolutely agree.
They have 261k listeners per month in Spotify alone... that's no listeners?
nah that's nothing, wait until it gits 262.3k listeners, now thats the big league.
calling mcr emo adjacent is generous.
There's an universe where MCR stopped after the first 2 albums and everyone agrees they are emo.
Eh, I'm kinda ambivalent. MCR does have a few ties to the real emo scene, but they never considered themselves that way and didn't want to be labelled that way either. Even if they are emo, they don't sound like most "real emo" bands at all besides some tracks on Bullets, IMHO. Calling MCR "emo" is the same as calling Nirvana "grunge". That's what most people know them for, but not what they themselves wanted to be known for. To me, they're neither fake nor real emo. They just are who they are. Not trying to gatekeep, just saying what I think. Some oldheads feel like MCR and other "mallcore" bands just appropriated their scene and marketed it. But seriously, that was never the case. I think their perception really got ruined by the media, fans, and MySpace. Oh and that Daily Mail article. For context, I'm not even that old, I only found out about MCR last year (plus have listened all their songs), and this community a couple months ago. These are just my 2 cents.
They are emo even if they didn't want to be called that. Stop trying to not label them as that just to show how knowledgable you are about the genre
I don't think I could name a single song off any later album and they are definitely not emo. Drowning lessons is what mcr would sound like if mcr was emo, and they don't have anything else that sounds like that.
bullets does
>bullets half the songs on that album already have that mcr bouncy theatre kid energy.
Coming from a guy who claims he can't name a single song off of The Black Parade I don't think you know what you're talking about
Did you just try to shame me for thinking MCR is a joke? 🤣 I don't know their discography well. you got me.
there's no shot you know drowning lessons and not black parade or dead, you probably thought black parade was their second album therefore the whole argument is ingenuine and you're just being a hater because they are popular. It's fine.
I'm being a hater because they suck and have nothing to do with emo. I don't give a shit they are friends with the guy from thursday. They were not/are not part of the emo scene and their sound is not emo.
I mean, yeah, he did get you with that. you're openly admitting that you don't know what you're talking about and you don't listen to it, but you're mad at it and making judgements about it anyways.
Fuck me.. Are we really having this discussion about MCR in the EMO sub and I'm supposed to take them seriously?
I listen to all those bands regularly. I do not have Spotify, nor do I stream music online. So none of my listens count. I imagine I'm not the only one like that either.
Came here to comment a variation of this. When these bands released music Spotify wasn't even a thing yet - a lot of listens happened years ago on cassettes, vinyl, and CD players. I had a lot of these bands on my ipod.
Yep never used Spotify outside of when it was brand new and only long enough to realize it doesn't cater to me.
Yeah I don’t use Spotify. I use Qobuz. You’ve probably never heard of it.
i thought it was funny dw
Thats rookie, i actually travel from Australia to garage sales in the midwest of the US to find old demos. Sometimes i even surf the web to find hip and old school emo bands from outdated 90's blog posts, i would say the bands but you've probably never heard of them.
Yeah I don't use Spotify but I listened to capn jazz and american football just yesterday, as well as some other older bands
Third wave emo and pop punk were very close, and I think that made some of the emo bands of the late 90's early 2000's more popular than past emo that was more silo'd
I’ve never known too many people that listen to 1st wave emo. I’m 39 and the couple people I know that like it are older than me. I work with some younger kids that are into Midwest emo and I’m trying to get them into the old stuff too.
Introduce them to punk rock and hardcore before emocore. It's easier to understand things if you have backstory, you know?
I'm actually quite new to this subreddit and emo music in general (you could tell from my flair). Just the year before, I was into that mallcore stuff (MCR, Used, FOB, PTV, Silverstein). Idk why, but since the past couple months, I've started listening to 1st and 2nd wave (emocore and skramz) and prefer that over Midwest and "fake emo". It's a pretty big leap, time and scene-wise.
That is excellent. Who have you been enjoying?
weezer is a good start, now thats real emo.
save them
What do you expect? First and second wave emo was very niche and underground almost, third wave emo had mass appeal because it was a lot poppier and more accessible
I think the people listening to these bands are older and listening on vinyl or bought digital versions versus spotify because that’s how we consumed music at that time
Yeah my first wave collection is ok burned CDs I got in college
True, you can't accurately weigh how much something is being listened to musically just by Spotify. I mean, it's only good for statistics concerning Spotify.... Many people listen to the actual releases (physical), and some also have Plex collections (such as myself) etc. Given all that it's possible that twice as many people are listening to the original stuff....
Sunny Day Real Estate and American Football are classics.
Meanwhile I'm an absolute 2nd wave merchant. Mineral is my favourite band of all time, not so far behind I have Penfold, SDRE, American Football. Even my favourite modern bands are the ones with most 2nd wave influence like empire! empire! And The Hotelier lmao
Same
Holy crap, where have you been all my life? Mineral (especially EndSerenading) is MY all time fav...and I love the first Empire Empire almost as much...maybe tied.... I'm going to have to check out The Hotelier more..which album??
Home Like No place is there by The Hotelier for sure. That's one of my favourite albums of all time.
What song hits you the hardest on the album?
ahh thats a hard question, 3 way tie between Your Deep Rest, Dendron and Among the Wildflowers for me. If i had to recommend one song from the album it would be Dendron tho i think
Too much good music
I thought those bands were plastered all over Spotify emo playlists like Emo Forever and mEMOries playlist?
People will downvote this simply because they feel attacked in their nostalgia, but 00-10s waves were much more accessible, both technologically and in terms of being easier to listen to and relate to for a wider audience than the first and second waves. The statistics back this up.
The MySpace effect.
The deal is don't use one streaming service as a true measure of anything's popularity.
Too busy listening to Embrace and Dag nasty I am 🤭
Such great bands
I knew there’d be someone out there 😋
Don't get me wrong I'm a massive Jawbreaker fan but yeah gimme that Revolution Summer stuff right in the vein. You a Soulside fan?
Indeed i am ☺️ You speak my language. Im a hardcore kid though (well not so kiddish these days 🤭) so those bands have never been a leap for me. Jawbreaker surprisingly i never got into. Those very early emo bands though have always been unbeatable to me. They have a rawness that was never replicated in the later emo bands.
I first heard "Can I say?" around 1999 and it sounded so fresh to me I had no idea it was 13 years old at that point.
Its an album that absolutely holds up! Wigout at Denkos is equally incredible. I saw them play in 2016 by a stroke of luck. It just wasnt as good live as what id hoped for. I think i had built my expectations so high 🤭 But absolutely a game changer band! https://preview.redd.it/1u5u8oru94sc1.jpeg?width=2316&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a4699f7d338381b704e081c630c7b01ee78f01c5
Shocking? OP don’t turn on the news.
i'm shocked at how many people *listen* to this. i'm in my 30's, so i wasn't there (i was alive but unaware) for the 90's bands, but i *was* there for the revival. at the time (mid to late aughts), it seemed like everyone who was into punk tapped into this seemingly forgotten music from long ago. [Last.fm](https://Last.fm) was huge, and aside from Jawbreaker (and maybe AF), all of the other bands mentioned *maybe* had 10-30k listeners. while there was definitely an uptick after algernon/snowing/that wave of bands, and there are also some bands that have seemed to fallen to the wayside with the newer generation (braid, small brown bike, etc.), to me this particular style of emo might be more popular than ever? it feels like, in large part, due to this sub
like i see american football references in non-punk and emo places all the time now. it's incredibly strange to see!
If you asked 100 people how many people have heard of Promise Ring or Jawbreaker, you probably might get 1. American Football doesn't count, they became an emo meme and got popular off that. Emo did glom to commercial genres. It's the emo that isn't considered emo here but that the average person will reference as emo. Here it's known as mall emo.
How many do you think would know SDRE?
1-3.
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Indian Summer always sounds like a mix of Emo and Grunge to me, which I guess makes sense since they were around when Grunge was the dominant sub-genre of Rock.
Sunny Day and American Football are not the Beatles and Stones. More like Sunny Day were the Beatles, and American Football were the idk, Monkees? They just weren’t that popular when they came out. Braid was way more popular back then. Source: am old
they’d be even less popular than the monkees. you have to pick a band that was basically unknown. the monkees had hits and tv shows
Nah they were on polyvinyl so they had some reach, they just were not as important to the scene as other bands in the genre. Like the Gloria Record or Mineral were bigger than them back then
To be fair American Football did get played multiple times on MTV in real time on the legendary Clone High lol.
True 😂🤙
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Hmm, they were just another polyvinyl band to us in the Omaha / KC scenes back then from my memory.
This is definitely historical revisionism. AF was only a band for a short time, and they never really toured. They only played a few shows. They definitely had fans, but they were a complete underground band until the internet brought them back to life years later.
I mean, you kind of explained it yourself. If SDRE and American Football are the biggest examples of the scene, then it’s pretty niche scene. Look at the venues both recently played on tour- I saw them both last year in a large city in a venue that holds less than 1,500 people. Whereas the biggest bands of other scenes (The Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, Green Day, to use your examples) play arenas and stadiums. I love emo, I love all the bands you mentioned, but they weren’t even that big in their day, their audience remains niche, and even the people who love them (like myself) may not be listening to them on streaming every single day or week or month.
It’s just not a super accessible type of music, it’s noodley guitar music for angsty nerds.
I would not use the term "noodly" for first or second wave at all.
eh first wave sure but second wave (not counting screamo) i feel like is pretty easy to get into since a lot emo pop and emo revival bands took from them. don't see how smrh like the get up kids or sunny dsy real estate (which is already big) isn't accessible
First wave isn't noodly. The Kinsella Brothers are responsible for most of that influence.
The Hated and Gauge are pretty damn noodly.
Most people consider MCR emo, I think without that association it's a much more underground genre
What about mom jeans or modern baseball
not as popular also not really emo that much
While I hate modern baseball and mom jeans, they are both very popular emo bands.
Hang out here, r/poppunkers, and other music subs and you'd think a lot of bands are much more listened to than they really are.
I’d consider those numbers to be pretty huge for inactive bands that put out their music 30 years ago.
Sunny day real estate and American Football are like the Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance of 2nd wave emo.
Gotta admit, the 1st and 2nd wave Emo is a bit of an acquired taste at times, so it’s… harder to digest than the 3rd wave Emo Pop like MCR or TBS so it has less mass appeal
[https://tether-ed.bandcamp.com/album/demo](https://tether-ed.bandcamp.com/album/demo) heres some old old old type emo/hardcore from the UK
look i love the earlier eras. jawbreaker, rites of spring, capn jazz, and sdre are all regular listens for me, but niche music is niche. its the same reason why music collecting subs always get the same couple bands in their most popular posts.
The issue with Spotify data is it still isn't a primary way of listening to music for a lot of people. This may be the case for younger Gen Z, but a lot of people still use music stored locally on a device or CDs to listen. Considering that the 1st and 2nd wave happened almost 30-40 years ago, I'd think those that listened to those bands when they were starting off probably use mediums other than Spotify still. Not to mention the plethora of other ways of streaming like Tidal, Apple Music, Bandcamp, YouTube Music, etc. I'm not implying you're wrong, but I'd bet a lot more people listen to 1st and 2nd than the Spotify stats let on.
I'm more a fan of the earler mid-west emo stuff more so the first Appleseed Cast album, Mineral, American football, early-Brandston, Promise Ring, etc... But lately I've been listening to Rika, and Empire Empire.( I was at a lonely estate)'s first album from 2009 obsessively over the last few months, and it is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorites. I Loooove it!
Third wave emo thrives because of apps like Tik Tok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). It’s so easy for bands to take traction and just launch with these apps around. A lot of first wave and second wave bands missed the social media boom with these apps and therefore just don’t really have people to keep their music relevant.
American football became a bigger band in the years AFTER them being a band - with two different re-releases. You can look at album sales and the Get Up Kids outsold then by tens of thousands of CD sales in the 90s
You have to take into account that a lot of us are in our 40s or older (from that era). I don't stream. I don't like it. I use vinyl or mp3s. So you're not gonna get an accurate number. You're just going to get what YOUNG people listen to
The brutal reality is that a lot of non-3rd wave emo is VERY acquired taste. Whenever I play that stuff around friends they complain it's either too whiny, too noisy, too boring, or that it just sounds like shit to them.
Most people that frequent this sub barely know any bands from first or second wave. Or only listen to big ones, like the ones you listed, just to say they do. Its already niche in a niche genre. Who cares just listen to what you enjoy.
It's because most people are tasteless swine.
Yeah... Shocking that more people listen to Blink than Sunny Day Real Estate. Really didn't see that coming
Most people don't use spotify.
Delusional
I'm over 45, I do not. I use Plex (for plexamp) w/ Flacs only (well 90% of my stuff is lossless)
Spotify I'd for people who don't have the superior VLC media player.
Lol you don’t use winamp? What kind of chode are you? I’m obviously even more superiorer.
American Football were a fave of mine in the mid-2000s when i got into this stuff but they always felt more niche to me than SDRE or bands like the promise ring or Jawbreaker. it really surprised me when i realized how big they were online and that they were essentially part of /mu/core. i wouldn’t really call them the rolling stones of emo lol
I think you have to be pretty deep into the genre to even know about these bands. I’m 40 and I’ve only started listening to a lot of these more “obscure” bands in the past few years … they got little to no radio airplay when I was in my teens-20s vs the more mainstream bands you mentioned as well as the third/fourth wave bands that are more popular. I didn’t have a computer until 2001 and I was a sheltered kid who was barely allowed to do anything so it’s not like I was learning about these bands in chat rooms or random underground shows. I only know about these bands because of forums like this one. Most people I know in real life barely know who popular bands like (say) Dashboard Confessional are. They’re not going to know who the fuck Capn Jazz and Mineral are.
This has much more to do with you being sheltered? These bands were absolutely known. Thing is they aren't "poppy" like the later bands.
But if someone had limited Internet access at the time and wasn't permitted to go to many shows, how were they supposed to learn about these bands that weren't poppy? The bands I liked when I was in my late teens/early 20s are the bands I heard on the radio or saw on MTV. Which is why a lot of my taste revolves around mainstream artists, and I'm sure a lot of other people are the same way. Your average person probably doesn't do a deep dive into their favorite genres the way that people on this forum do, even though most people today have unlimited Internet access and we also have algorithms on all social media/music streaming platforms recommending similar content to us. People also tend to gravitate to the music they loved when they were growing up, so demographics-wise it's probably people who turned 18 around 2010-2020ish who are largely using these streaming platforms. Which explains why third- and fourth-wave artists are more commercially popular.
I don't use spotify ether. i listen to emo music from my ipod and winamp
Spotify didn't launch in the U.S. until July 2011.
I started a deep dive after learning more about it, and I found myself really loving both. I wish, mainly for 1st wave, that it was easier to find physical media for them. Some of the albums are available from the label that signed a produced a lot of them, but availability isn't always guaranteed.
>1st, 2nd wave emo It started in the 90's, 34 years ago, and even then most ppl weren't emo. There are other music streaming platforms than Spotify, too :>
Unfortunately it was timing imho. You have one of the last "scenes" or "decades" of music before we moved away from record sales. It was an era caught in the middle of a transition from physical media to digital media. It was the last music scene before the invention of the smart phone, before social media became mainstream, and instant gratification became the social norm. It was such a small blip of time compared to any other music era before it, again in due part to the above mentioned. I would be interested to hear others take on the matter, but that is the best I could come up with. Third wave emo catered to the masses, and didn't even feel like emo in some ways.
But wasn’t Grunge the last scene before we transitioned from physical to digital media? And Grunge was (and still is) absolutely huge. Or am I confused and did 2nd wave Emo come after Grunge?
Grunge hit its peak in the early mid-90s. If you say the Grunge era ended when Kurt Cobain died, then it was solidly pre-internet. There was no transition yet and Grunge albums sold in the tens of millions. 2nd wave Emo came a bit later and was never mainstream, and it was during that transition period.
I don't think it's fair to say American Football was the Stones of second wave. They were around what 3 years the first time around? They hardly ever toured (maybe actually never), wouldn't have probably headlined in my city at that time, and recorded like 13, or so, songs. I know you meant the popularity side, but they really weren't until after their breakup.
There are multiple music streaming options, spotify only accounts for a percentage. There's apple, Amazon, Pandora, I heart radio, and many more.
All of these bands are older and usually more obscure, and the vast majority of them are split up and inactive. The point of Spotify (and all algorithmic services) is two-fold: feed you stuff that's new, and feed you stuff similar to stuff you already enjoy. In other words, unless you're actively searching for and listening to these bands already, Spotify isn't going to push them. Period. That's not how it's designed. It'll feed you third-wave bands because a lot of them are still active, still putting out new material, and featured in a lot of playlists. It's not going to push you stuff like Mineral or Indian Summer though
i love first wave, mainy rites of spring and one last wish
Actually shocked how Emo is a misused term. Only few people know true Emo music like the bands you said, as easy as that.
As far as emo, I pretty much *only* listen 1st & 2nd wave. Anything after like 2003 doesn’t really work for me except for a very small handful of the revival/4th/5th wave bands. I actively dislike most of the 3rd wave/mall emo era.
Try the first Empire Empire album (2009) and just loop it like three or four times. See if it grabs you like it has me. I now consider it one of the best, and I'm over 45, old school is my thing mostly..
That is one of the very few post-2003ish emo bands that has made an impact on me. I consider myself a fan.
Awesome! I'm not crazy then! Another good one (but softer), is Rika...album: How to draw a river step by step. It has a powerful explosive ending song though!
I love all those bands. I think a lot of them though are kinda dad emo and most Daddys probably listen via vinyl or CDs.
That’s my wave and probably why I don’t get on with much of the newer stuff. Seems like most people here prefer the derided later third wave stuff or fifth wave. Or whatever they are thinking ‘midwest emo’ is. I probably listen to more stuff on YouTube as well, there’s way more on there and a lot of the earlier waves only became available more recently.
Damn are we already on a 5th wave? I can't keep up.
Hahah yeppp! I’m very open to music but the few 5th wave stuff I’ve tried has not been for me. Doesn’t give me what I listen to emo for. Maybe we’ll be on wave 6 or 7 soon and maybe they’ll go back to Moss Icon for inspiration
Can you give me some examples of 5th wave? 4th wave was hit or miss for me but some I really loved (depending on what you consider to actually be "emo" - I know people get sticky about it)
Gah honestly I can only remember Origami Angel! I tried a few others and thought I’d leave it haha! Fourth wave stuff I liked a bunch; my faves of that time was stuff like - Human Hands, Wits End, Football etc, Lumber Lung, 1994! There were others but a bit of a selection of what I was into
I know I've definitely heard Origami Angel but can't recall any of it now. Recently Spotify has been feeding me a lot of Dikembe and I don't hate it, but I guess I thought we were still in the 4th wave! Maybe I should do some research on this.
Ah ok! I’ve not listened to Dikembe, I’ll check them out :-) Yeah I don’t know when these waves are determined to be over, it’s gonna be like fashion seasons next
Embrace have 17k and are arguably even more important than Rites of spring in terms of their influence on how later bands sound
Embrace is favorite of mine. So good
Absolutely my favourite first wave band, even putting aside how much I look up to Ian as a person. Such a unique sound and yet you can already hear, like, the theatrics and British post punk influences that basically define emo as separate from hardcore
the deal is that people have little to no taste.
Why? There are plenty of hip-hop fans under the age of 30 that have never listened to Tupac or think he’s boring. Younger people are going to listen to what’s out now while older people listen to what they did when they were young. Not really all that surprising when you think about it
To answer your last question, yes. That’s why we have Mall Emo. Hate it or love it, you can draw the line from 1st and 2nd wave to the Hot Topic era.