I think I lived through a different 90’s than the article talks about. No nirvana, no soundgarden, no STP, no alice in chains. I did see a single Pearl Jam song listed though.
I checked the first part linked at bottom, and apparently their version of 60s doesn't have The Beatles. They had The Doors, though, so it's not like they ignore all alternative-ish rock. Just almost all of it.
On one of their other pages they have a note that The Beatles is a notable artist that isn't in Spotify (or wasn't, at the time), so that is probably why.
Have you checked how popular these artists really were at the time outside your group of friends? None of them have ever had a top-five single in the US. Several of them have very barely had a top-hundred single!
It's just short of their qualifying requirement, which is top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. "Smells like Teen Spirit" reached a high of #6: https://www.billboard.com/music/nirvana
> It's just short of their qualifying requirement, which is top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. "Smells like Teen Spirit" reached a high of #6: https://www.billboard.com/music/nirvana
That seems like a pretty bad criteria for a list like this, because it's heavily biased towards "flashes in the pan" and exudes "steady fires."
They should have probably used a "total" metric or at least augmented the list based on it. I think something like total airplay or total sales in the 5 years after release would have caught many of the songs people thing they should have included.