Obviously, the acts on this list had the bulk of their essential recording decades ago. Some of those songs sound as fresh today as they did then. Iron Butterfly however may not be one of those bands.

The average person might recall Gary Numan’s greatest hit, “Cars” and think of it as a quirky one hit wonder that was a flash in the pan of the New Wave era. Gary Numan’s career was actually much more than that and his contributions to the world of Electronic music may be incalculable.

While compiling this list, non committee members asked us about out ranking and pointed out albums sales as to why our rankings made no sense to them. As often as those debates began (and will perpetually continue) we expect a series of debates based on concert attendance. If that was our factor, how many people would be higher than Jimmy Buffett?

If you were to take a guess as to who was the first Motown act to score a #1 hit, few would guess the Marvelettes. It is hard to see why this would be the case as this was a girl group that had many hits in the early days of Rock. It also easy to see why they might not be considered as they had a Pop sound that didn’t sound like the Motown groups that followed.