Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by coldtea 1426 days ago
Brian Eno. Hardly an obscure reference.
1 comments

> household name musicians

He's not a "household name musician", either.

Elvis, Beatles, Queen, Kanye West, Rihanna, Madonna, Beyoncé, Adele, etc are household name musicians.

Brian Eno is maybe a strong influence in the field, but few regular people outside of actual musicians have heard of him around the world, I'd venture.

I hadn't known about him before reading his Wikipedia page, just now. And I tend to read a lot :-)

I'm guessing you're well under the age of 40?
Yes, and not from the UK.

I did list Elvis and Beatles and I can list more stuff from the 50s and 60s onwards. Brian Eno would not be on those lists.

As an American who lived through the 90s, Brian Eno is a household name. YMMV from other backgrounds, for sure.
> He's not a "household name musician", either.

How do we determine who is? Is Vangelis?

Ask a few random folks of various ages, on the street. Check out YouTube views for some of their videos, weighted by decade (videos from the 80s with tens of millions of views can be considered as popular as stuff with high hundreds of millions now). Album sales. Chart rankings from multiple countries. Endorsement revenues.

This is not rocket science.

I don't think the world is as flat as you think.
It is when someone makes bold claims such as "household name".

Artsy musicians ain't it.

Vangelis îs a lot closer to that than Eno, amusingly :-)

He may have been a household name in England. I have no idea. If you're into electronic music, I think you're bound to see him mentioned somewhere because it seems people like namedropping him.

That said, I completely agree that you can't expect any young people to know who he is.