The World's 15 Most Influential Rock Artists Revealed

Arguing about rock music might be as old as rock music itself. And I’ve spent so much time partaking in that pastime that I’ve had the time to flip-flop my position on certain debates. Take the age-old Beatles-Rolling Stones discourse as an example. In my youth, I was firmly on The Beatles’ side. “The Rolling Stones would be nothing without The Beatles,” I remember saying. “Their first single to crack the top 20 in the United Kingdom was written by The Beatles.”

When I dove deep into Exile on Mainstreet in college, I started to second guess my sureness. The Beatles, I began to think, could never pull off a loose, bluesy mess like this album. And that’s probably true. But then in the last ten years I’ve slid back to my youth. The Beatles are better than The Rolling Stones. I’m sure of it.

Of course, this is an unsolvable debate. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones both made fantastic music. And luckily you don’t have to choose between the two. You can enjoy both Beggars Banquet and Abbey Road without paying anyone much mind. Nevertheless, there is a debate that we might be able to solve, namely which band is more influential.

In an ideal world, if we wanted to figure out if The Beatles or The Rolling Stones were more influential, we’d send a survey out to every professional rock musician and ask them to list who inspired them to pick up their instrument. Then we’d count each time either The Rolling Stones or The Beatles were listed and see who got mentioned more often. While this approach is somewhere between impossible and infeasible, there might be a tool that can help us get at the idea: Wikipedia.

On the Wikipedia page for the band the Stone Temple Pilots, there’s an interesting passage near the end of the article about their performance on VH1 Storytellers:

During the taping of their VH1 Storytellers performance, [Scott] Weiland acknowledged artists such as the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Robert Plant as their musical heroes.

In short, according to lead singer Scott Weiland, the Stone Temple Pilots were most influenced by The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. If this were the fictional survey I just discussed, then each of those artists would get one point of influence. Maybe if we could scan the Wikipedia pages of every rock band, we could not only proxy if The Beatles or The Rolling Stones were more influential but which rock band was the most influential generally. Luckily, we can do this.

Using Wikipedia’s API, I grabbed all 479 artists found on the site’s “List of mainstream rock performers.” Then for each of those performers, I aggregated a list of every musical artist their page linked to. I then cross-referenced that list of artists to the initial list of rock performers. Then voila, we had a way to try to answer our debate.

LONG LIVE ROCK: The Most Influential Rock Bands According To Wikipedia Link Data:

1. The Beatles

2. Led Zeppelin

3. The Rolling Stones

4. U2

5. David Bowie

6. Bob Dylan

7. Elton John

8. Queen

9. Jimi Hendrix

10. Red Hot Chili Peppers

11. Bruce Springsteen

12. Green Day

13. Aerosmith

14. The Who

15. Metallica

According to this methodology, The Beatles are not only more influential than The Rolling Stones, they are the most influential rock band of all-time. If you’ve read anything about rock music in the last six decades, this shouldn’t come as a shock. The Beatles are probably the most popular and critically acclaimed act to ever record a song.

If that’s the case, then was this entire exercise a waste of time? No. If you crunch some numbers and they reinforce your preconceived notions, that’s not a bad thing. It means that your gut was onto something. Additionally, there have been many times in my career where I’ve run an analysis that I think is a waste of time and find that the results go against everything I thought. As long as your process is sound, an analysis is generally worthwhile irrespective of the results.

Chris Dalla Riva is a musician who spends his days working at Audiomack, a popular music streaming service. He writes a weekly newsletter about popular music and data called Can't Get Much Higher. His writing and research has also been featured by The Economist, NPR, and Business Insider. Can’t Get Much Higher is also available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack.