Top 50 Best Musicians/Bands Since 2000
 

Greetings Music Banter!

Among the many things I do in music, I am a semi-professional music journalist who has started a music review site. Over the course of four months, I conducted a fun and rewarding research project to find who I thought were the best musicians of today's generation. This consisted of me listening to around 200 albums and reading many articles about the backgrounds and overall output of many musicians. I was surprised, to say the least, at the amount of incredible music I found.

I wrote an article called "Top 50 Best Musicians/Bands Since 2000" on my site as a way to share some of today's music that I felt needed to be heard. Based on my subjective discerning of the use of each musician's melody, harmony, and timbre (all essential musical elements), I loosely created a list. This list is not necessarily a hard and fast ranking of who is better than who, but instead a compilation of musicians that can be considered the best of their generation. The article is meant for those who have doubted the quality in this generation of musicians, and also for those who are stuck listening to the same few talent-less hacks over and over again. I have found these writers/readers at Music Banter to be more sophisticated and learned than the average music listener, and so I must say that this isn't really my target audience. I am sharing this here as a simple way of getting my voice out there, as well as a way to get feedback about my article from an intelligent music forum.

If you have time, please read my article, easily found at themusicobserver.com (sorry, I cannot post an actual url here). It explains exactly why I embarked on this project plus my reasoning behind each musician/band that I included.

For brevity's sake, here is my list:

1. Regina Spektor
2. Sufjan Stevens
3. The Decemberists
4. Mumford & Sons
5. Arcade Fire
6. Vampire Weekend
7. Animal Collective
8. Florence and the Machine
9. Alabama Shakes
10. The New Pornographers
11. The Killers
12. MGMT
13. Arctic Monkeys
14. Kendrick Lamar
15. Portugal. the Man
16. Avril Lavigne
17. Cage the Elephant
18. The Strokes
19. Adele
20. M.I.A.
21. LCD Soundsystem
22. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
23. Neon Trees
24. Tame Impala
25. Grouplove
26. Michelle Branch
27. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
28. Titus Andronicus
29. Foster the People
30. Ingrid Michaelson
31. Lady Gaga
32. Fitz and the Tantrums
33. St. Lucia
34. Los Campensinos!
35. Reverend and the Makers
36. J. Cole
37. St. Vincent
38. Of Monsters and Men
39. The Head and the Heart
40. The Naked and Famous
41. Kamasi Washington
42. Jukebox the Ghost
43. Two Door Cinema Club
44. Paramore
45. BADBADNOTGOOD
46. The Lumineers
47. Kelly Clarkson
48. Beirut
49. Young the Giant
50. Janelle Monáe

Once you get to a certain level of musicality, everything becomes very difficult to judge and compare. I am not, by any means, declaring that I am "right" about anything in my article, but I do believe that what I have done is important. Sharing good music among ourselves is the best way for music to survive.

Dude, this is so true.

Lady Gaga? No. Nonononononono.......

Oh, and where is Dolly Parton?

She was a really tough listen. Most everything she put out after 2010 was really low quality. But I had to concede to the fact that she single-handedly overturned the pop genre with fearlessness and, frankly, artistry. I'll admit she's quite a sore thumb sticking out amongst the rest, but some of her early melodies were just too damn catchy for me, and many musicians today can't write a lick to save their life.

Ok. So your list should contain only artists that are relatively unknown.

Some of the ones that I didn't include I think it's still unfair to say they are relatively unknown.

Pretty much none of what is on this list is considered unknown. This guy must work for Billboard.

<3

I guess I did contradict myself there a bit. "Deserve attention" may have not been the best choice of words. My goal was not to find musicians that were unknown are share them, but rather to show what I believe is the best this generation has had to offer so far. I originally thought those would mostly include unknowns. In fact, I'm rather shocked at the amount of high-profile musicians I featured. I think those inclusions also provide nice and easy comparison points to others that may not be more well known.