Recordings by Decade

Of related interest:

Discography: List of the albums covered here.
Top Ten Tunes of the
Top 100 Tunes of the Century.

The graph below illustrates the age distribution of individual tune recordings in this database. The original recording date of each tune (not the publication or reissue date) is considered here. See the Discography for a full list of my sources.

One way to interpret this is as an approximate depiction of the historical tides of activity of the recording industry in traditional Irish music. A significant factor to consider, however, is that my data on recordings before the 1990s reflects what has been selected for reissues or anthologies in CD format.

Decade	Number of tune recordings	Percentage
1900–1909	7	0.1%
1910–1919	85	0.6%
1920–1929	305	2.3%
1930–1939	231	1.8%
1940–1949	141	1.1%
1950–1959	399	3.0%
1960–1969	369	2.8%
1970–1979	1,829	13.9%
1980–1989	1,433	10.9%
1990–1999	4,499	34.1%
2000–2009	3,892	29.5%
Total	13,190	100%

Please cite your source when you share information from this document. This page was updated on 16 February 2010.
© 2001–2010 Alan Ng, agng@facstaff.wisc.edu. Questions? Comments? Please use the easy Feedback Form. Thank you!
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