Hypothetical situation...
One day you're messing around with your friend Doc's Delorean and you hit 88 mph. Suddenly you've gone back to the year 19__. You have retained your musical knowledge from the year 2007 and can play an instrument.
With your knowledge of the huge hits from each future decade and year you could potentially become the greatest rock and roll artist of all time. Imagine coming out with Purple Haze the year before Hendrix first did. Then follow that up with some greatest hits of the Clash, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Metallica, Radiohead...all before the original artist could. Hell, you could make Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper weeks apart.
You could even be the greatest one hit wonder maker, coming out with the 2 biggest one hit wonder songs every decade.
You could be considered the greatest and most prolific artist of all time. There'd be no limit to your riches. But would you feel guilty? Could you enjoy this music knowing that someone else should have made it? Think about it McFly....

haha, awesome thread. However, there is a tiny little hole, a lot of songs and stuff were so huge and still are huge to this day because of marketing and the artists who recorded those songs, so who's to say if you come out w/ one of the all time greatest hits if you would have made the song as sucessful and memorable w/ your image. Especially if you are constantly releasing mega hits from multiple genres, marketing could either be quite hard or quite ingenious.

I think it would be really cool to go back in time and just release the mega hits from each genre as if they were my own, you could go down in history as one of the best if not the BEST musician and artist of all time...

Think of the groupies.

But again, there is so much more to music then just the music, and thats unfortunate, however, its something that needs to be considered. ANd just because you are putting out the timeless classics as they are considered today, does not mean that woudl end up becoming super mega hits if you were the one releasing them.

Go back to the 50's. Be the writer - not the artist - for a large number of the bubble-gum teen pop type hits. Enough to get you a rep as a really great songwriter. Then you just call up a young, relatively unknown guitarist named Jimi Hendrix and say, "I'm X, you've heard of me. I wrote a song I think would be perfect for you."

So you get more of an insider fame, as much money, and hopefully don't change much of the actual performance. Its not like I could go back and do Tina's "Proud Mary" like she did.

Excellent Idea RunDownHouse.

I kinda like the sneaky behind the scenes thing too...

These theories wouldn't work because you have to keep in mind the evolution of music. People don't like new types of music right away. It gradually changes and moves forward. Releasing Purple Haze in the 50's just wouldn't work, because the times were different. You think an anti-war song from the late 60's that was about free love, psychedelic drug use and counter culture would work in the bubble gum era of the 50's? Likewise, do you think the bling bling hip hop of today would work in the 60's? You might start a movement, but rarely if ever are pioneers the ones that become the legends, in the "mainstream" at least (for example, alot of people think Nirvana was the first grunge band EVAR ZOMG, but they weren't). Also, the technology of today wouldn't be available unless you brought it with you or you could develop it yourself. Granted, electric guitars were available, but you wouldn't be able to make techno beats unless you had the equipment.

So, basically I'm saying that you may become an underground legend, but you wouldn't be uber-rich and uber-famous and considered the greatest musician ever.

I never said you should release the songs in the wrong decade. Hopefully you'd realize that certain songs are decade/movement specific.

you mean i could get four of my friends together and release "I Want It That Way" in 1988?

I'd buy the rights to the songs from the songwriters.

Either that, or save Michael Jackson's career...no, buy the rights.

Right, and timing is everything. Therefore, unless you got your plagiarized song out and hit the mainstream soon enough, you'd be nothing more than a track on "Time Life Best of the 60's or 70's." And for some reason, I don't think you'd be "ahead of your time" in whatever era you decided to go to, because you didn't grow up in that era, you weren't experienced in it, you weren't a part of it. I just feel that simply going back in time wouldn't automatically make you a superstar, especially if you're not genius. Remember, there was/is something special about people like Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix. It wasn't simply the songs they put out, it was the relevant, timeless lyrics they put into their songs. Some "time-traveler" couldn't accomplish this on advanced knowledge alone.

Which is especially true if you consider that people actually don't care at all if a song is "new" or not. Your typical scale in music has 8 notes you can build chords on and some combinations are really pleasant for the human ear and the typical guy next door who just listens to music for fun and recreation just isn't trained to actually spot the similarities. For example, if you somehow arrived in the 50s there wouldn't be much difference if you recorded The Beatles' Let It Be, With Or Without You from U2 or just wrote your own song with the same chords (which countless artists do even today, anyway), since it's pretty much the same from a theoretical point of view.

When you think about it, that just makes the whole Johnny Be Good scene from Back To The Future even more ironic, since we're talking about a standard blues line here which has been done to death during that time and has been picked up regularly later.

So ...

You can be sure I couldn't care less.
Just like the majority of today's musicians don't care while doing basically the same.

Easiest rickroll ever.

OP, I'm pretty sure David Bowie has been doing this for years.

brilliant

QFTMFT

I'd do it, and whenever they'd ask me how i wrote the songs, I'd just tell them I'm from the future, and that i stole the songs from future artists. That way I would have been honest + I'd get the crazy rock genius stamp on me.

How about a non-musician who changed music forever:



-ZEN

<3 Moog

Also, another non-musician who changed music forever, Leo Fender !

Then cap off your career by growing a huge afro and killing an actress when she rejects your offer of a Viagra-fueled sexfest.

RDH has it right. Think of it like buying stocks. You wouldn't go back to 1950 and buy Microsoft, you'd buy US Steel, or whatever. Then, 30 years later you'd buy Microsoft. The real potential in this would be the ability to know how the musical landscape changed over 50 years, and to always be one step ahead - business-wise that is.