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The Mysterious, Enduring Appeal of
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours
On Spotify, it has more streams than any Beatles album, Nirvana’s Nevermind, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, or anything else from the 20th century. In 2024, it was the year’s biggest-selling rock album, old or new. (Yes, really.) What gives?
By
Alan Light
Esquire
Almost fifty years after its release in 1977, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is somehow still one of the most popular albums in the world. Created in a cauldron of intraband romantic turmoil and fueled by voracious drug intake, this very week, it sits at Number 19 on Billboard’s album chart. In 2023, Rumours was the most streamed album of the twentieth century on Spotify—more than any Beatles album, more than Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, more than Nirvana’s Nevermind or Dr. Dre’s The Chronic or anything else. In 2024, it was the year’s biggest-selling rock album, old or new.
These numbers are being powered not by the Boomers and older Gen-Xers who grew up with the album in real time and made it the seventh-best-selling album in US history, but by younger generations. There is something in the music—or, maybe more precisely, in the experience of Rumours that separates it from the pack, even from the most elite. But does that allure revolve around the sound, the emotion, the mythology, or some combination of all its elements? Why does one album survive and even thrive when others—even those that felt much more influential at their peak—inevitably become dated?
To put it simply, why do kids like this old-ass album?
Curious to better understand this cultural marvel, for my new book Don’t Stop: Why We (Still) Love Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, I spoke to dozens of post-millennials. One thing that almost all of them wanted to establish was that while they might have initially heard the record through their parents, or even their grandparents, the relationship they had with Rumours was entirely their own. Many echoed the idea that they were first exposed to these songs in their youth but then went through a process of rediscovering the album and relating to it for themselves, creating their own meanings for the record.
Others pointed to the various appearances by Rumours in their own popular culture as their way into the album. Music publicist Lydia Krumper (born 2000) notes a convergence of Mac references in the mid-2010s. “In 2014, Stevie Nicks was on American Horror Story,” she says. “Glee had an all-Rumours episode. I was also a big One Direction fan, and Harry Styles is a big Fleetwood Mac fan. Many things for my age group were coming out at the time when I got into it.”
