because every decade or so, the Year Zero cut off point for when rock music as we know it began seems to get brought forward.

When I started listening to music in the early 70s, you still regularly heard 50's rock n roll on the radio (however it was as if nothing existed prior to Rock Around the Clock, so it never went back earlier than 1954. Not on stations that played pop/rock music anyway).

As time went on, that seemed to change to about 1963 when the Beatles broke. You pretty much stopped hearing anything before that.

Pop/rock radio in the UK was never as genre obsessed as American radio seems to be, although thats changed a bit in recent years with the advent of satellite radio and the restructuring of BBC Radio, but even on channels that do play oldies, I doubt you'd get much before 1970 now.

Considering the fact that the Stones havent really been a 'current' act (in the way they were in the 60s and 70s) since about 1981, unless things change, you're conceivably looking at their music as having a shelf life of about another 5-10 years in radio terms before it gets relegated to the comparative obscurity that befell stuff like blues or swing, etc.

We grew up imagining that people would still be listening to this music for 100 years. Just a couple of decades on, its quite evident that its really not working out like that at all. Music radio and TV have changed so much in the last decade and everything has become too disposable in a competitive industry for that to be viable.

Such great lists! I agree with most of the entries here.... I would like to add one I don't think I see....."After The Goldrush". Yep