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If you look at:

UK instrumental number ones : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_instrumental_number_ones_on_the_UK_Singles_Chart

US instrumental number ones : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_chart_achievements_and_milestones#Instrumental_number-ones

You can see that in the 50s to the 70s, there were quite a number of instrumental number one singles in the UK and US charts. Since then there have been very few. What could be the reasons for this?

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    It is an interesting claim, but some supporting information is needed. Otherwise it just depends on what music I or anyone else is familiar with. My guess, however, is that in some respects popular music was in a transitional period between composition focused (classical, jazz, show tunes) to a primarily electronic, lyric based music. During such transition periods, you have a mix of both old and new for a period of time, to help ease such change. – user3169 Feb 26 '15 at 19:31
  • @user3169 supporting information added. –  Feb 26 '15 at 20:10
  • Voted to close. This is too subjective and not in the scope of SE. – Johnny Bones Feb 26 '15 at 20:43
  • @JohnnyBones I appreciate you saying so :) Is there a meta thread dealing with this kind of question? –  Feb 26 '15 at 20:49
  • Not specifically, but if you vote to close a question you'll see that one of the reasons is "This question is too subjective", or something like that. SE, in general, isn't meant to be a "message board", and the entire site (including all of these "sub-sites" like Music Fans, Music Theory, Movies, Super User, etc...) generally discourages questions that don't have specific, fact-based answers. Therefore, any question dealing with "popularity", "Top-10", "best", etc, is usually discouraged. – Johnny Bones Feb 26 '15 at 21:03
  • @JohnnyBones Thanks. I've reworded the question to remove the word 'popularity', in case that's offputting. –  Feb 26 '15 at 21:15
  • Maybe you need to add stats of how many instrumental tracks are released now and then vs number of regular songs. I still think it will end up with an opinion based answer that is effectively the same as the answer to Why rock music is not the charts anymore – Roger Mellie Mar 05 '15 at 17:19
  • @RogerMellie those stats would be relevant but would probably take me halfway towards answering my own question! Any question that isn't itself predicated on opinion should be logically possible to answer in a factual way. I appreciate that it doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to do so, but there's nothing to say that questions have to be easy! –  Mar 05 '15 at 17:32
  • At the time, there just weren't many popular instrumentals compared to the volume of other music. Keep in mind that this was Top 40 AM radio days, and they were the driving force in what people were exposed to and what became popular. Unfortunately popular instrumentals were few and far between. – user3169 Mar 05 '15 at 21:39
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    Meta post discussing whether or not this question is on topic – Zach Saucier Mar 05 '15 at 22:25

2 Answers2

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It's a very limited data-set given that we're only looking at #1s. However, given the fact that they were most predominant in a couple of decades (60s and 70s) I think it's fair to speculate that it's primarily an issue of what genre's were popular at the time.

With the 60s, there was still a lot of jazz-influence in the pop charts. Jazz has a lot of instrumental compositions.

In the late 60s into the 70s, we entered the era of Album Oriented Rock where long form instrumental jams were a staple of nearly every rock album released during that time.

So it was just a numbers game. There were more instrumental pieces being released in the popular genres during those periods.

DA.
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Honestly, with the involvement of technology in music, such as auto-tune, recording vocals is now a piece of cake. With this confidence, bands tend to add vocals in most of their tracks. And in the current trend, vocal tend to match the instrumental complexity. If the instrument play through is complex, the vocalists today tend to bring the same complexity into their vocals, with pitch shifts, tempo changes and timing variations. So instrumental tracks are very low in number. That doesn't mean there are none. There are some beautiful instrumental tracks out there. Be sure to look of for them.

Varun Nair
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