Classic rock radio: one big sample bias

No less geekily-inclined a personage than XKCD’s Randall Munroe has just fallen victim to my favorite geeky example of sample bias. In today’s comic, a character makes the common refrain that today’s music just isn’t as good as the previous generation’s. Accusations of rockism aside, he fails to realize that most people our age [wow, Randall Munroe is only six months older than me!] take our view of classic rock from, well, classic rock radio. Of course it sounds better — classic rock’s very purpose is to remember that 1971 gave us “Stairway to Heaven,” yet forget that it also gave us “Baby, I’m-a Want You.”