What was the best year for music between the years 1900 and 2000?

1988 because of “Never gonna give you up”

It depends on who you’re asking and what year they were born, but I’ll throw in my suggestion and say the 90s.

1976— Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, Genesis, Journey, and tons more. Best year ever for selling records.

@zenvelo I was thinking of 1976! I LOVE the music from that period.

1967

Alas, that I was born too late.

70’s. Late 60’s too.

@KatetheGreat They were so…creative. It was all new. It’s hard to find a new sound anymore.

@Dutchess_III Exactly. The stuff they play these days makes my ears bleed. I enjoy the music from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. The Talking Heads, ABBA, and The Bee Gees are actually some of my absolute favorite bands.

And so much of the music is mechanically created now a days. In the 60’s and 70’s they played their own guitars and drums! And the whole band was the star, and they got there themselves. Nowadays you take one good singer and Hollywood wraps all kinds of special effects and mechanical music around that person and make them into a star.

I kinda don’t think Steven Tyler would have made it today because he’s…. ugly. WELL! He is! But my gosh he’s forceful.

1972 when Rock and Roll showed us what simple rock and roll could do to make someone filthy rich!

1967.

My second choice is 1944. Beseme Mucho and Round Midnight sealed it.

1936

Carmina Burana, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 3, etc.

@DominicX – Yeah, that is a great year. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf was released as well, right?

Yup. Also a good one :)

Ah hell. What about “Ina Godda Davita???”

If you are going to quote a song ya need to get the title right! In A Gadda Da Vida ;))

1958. Culminated from the prior pioneering jazz, blues, folk and rock n roll musicians, rock and roll managed to get enough mainstream status to be established into society, which led to Beatlemania and the entire musical explosion that came from the late sixties and seventies. Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis. Yeah, Elvis may have enlisted that year, but his contribution had been made for now. 1958 was key to the progression of music into what we have now.

Well…I seriously liked 1958 too. Seriously.

1958? The summer of Volare? Whoa – oh! It may have been a pivotal year, but it is far from the best year in music of the 20th century.

1980 – 1988

Here’s another post for 1967.

We dropped acid and went to Golden Gate Park in San Fran. on June 21, 1967 for the Summer Solstice Love-In.

We saw Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead for free.

1967 is when the Cream and Jimi Hendrix released their first albums.
Their arrival signified the emergence of comparatively advanced musicianship, the most notable of which for me was the guitar work of Clapton and Hendrix.

Not sure of exact dates,

but Jim Croce, Harry Chapin, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor were the key musicians of the time. None of them would win Ameerican Idol today.

Ah shit…@Brian1946….

@WestRiverrat That would be the 70’s.

@Dutchess_III

Ah shit for seeing Janis Joplin, 1967, or something else?

Ah shit, I wish I’d been there!!! Stop talking now, before I break down in a jealous fit!!...You make it to Woodstock?

@Dutchess_III

“Stop talking now, before I break down in a jealous fit!!...You make it to Woodstock?”

Perhaps the fact that I was confined to a Navy ship during Woodstock will help to assuage your envy. ;-)
Also, if I’m not mistaken, Woodstock turned out to be a communal mud bath that involved over 300,000 people.

Yeah, well…it was history that I was too young to help make! OK, my envy is assuaged. A little!

Considering the responses to this question, the question details should be reworded to,

When was American pop(ular) music at it’s absolute best? What made that year so important?

It’s really annoying when people make generalizations about something as vast and complex as the spectrum of musical genres.