Todd Rundgren has offered a theory for a changing pop landscape that is simple, provocative and extremely hard to sustain: video games, he argues, helped make female artists the biggest stars in the world because boys in the 1990s began spending money on games rather than music.
Rundgren’s career gives the opinion some undeniable music-world weight. He has been recording since 1970 and has production credits connected with XTC, Patti Smith, Hall and Oates, Sparks, the New York Dolls, Bad Religion and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. That is a remarkable body of work across styles and decades. But expertise in producing records does not automatically turn a broad cultural diagnosis into a persuasive explanation—particularly where video games, gender, spending and stardom are all treated as parts of one straight line.
“The biggest artists in the world are female artists at this point, and that’s because of video games,” Rundgren said. “Back in the ’90s, boys stopped spending money on music and started spending it on video games.”
There are several separate claims packed into those two sentences. One is about where young people spent discretionary money. Another is about who buys music. A third is about why certain musicians become exceptionally popular. Finally, there is an implied claim about gender: that young male listeners no longer supporting male artists created room for women to dominate. Each could be discussed on its own. Put together, they become a neat story. Neat stories are often more satisfying than the messy systems that actually shape culture.
Gaming did compete for attention—but that is not the whole argument
It is reasonable to say games competed with music for time, attention and, for some people, allowance money in the 1990s. A person with limited money cannot buy every album, console, cartridge or game they want. Entertainment choices involve trade-offs. That part is ordinary consumer behavior, not a scandalous revelation.
But competition for money does not establish that games caused the rise of women in pop. It would only show that games were one entertainment option among others. To get from that observation to Rundgren’s conclusion, one would need to establish much more: that boys uniquely abandoned music, that their spending had a decisive effect on which artists succeeded, that male performers depended on those purchases in a way female performers did not, and that the same shift explains the present-day position of women at the top of pop. None of that follows automatically from the fact that games became a major pastime.
It also reduces the act of becoming a fan to a single purchase decision. Music fandom is not merely buying a record. It involves listening, sharing, identity, performance, community, radio exposure and many other forms of attention. In the same way, playing games is not simply money disappearing from a music budget. It is a medium with its own soundtracks, performers, social spaces and cultural influences.
That distinction matters because the theory frames games as a cultural vacuum: boys enter, music exits, and an entire star system changes. Games plainly did not operate that way. They became more prominent alongside music, rather than replacing the possibility of caring about music.
The 1990s do not fit one clean story
Rundgren’s account looks back at a decade that began with Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails as highly visible forces, then moved through a late-1990s landscape where acts such as *NSYNC and the Spice Girls were enormous. That is a real contrast in mainstream visibility. It is not, however, proof that one audience had been taken away by controllers and cartridges.
The decade itself contains competing examples. Male-fronted rock was culturally massive early in the period. Boy bands were male artists with enormous pop success later in it. The Spice Girls were a defining pop phenomenon, but their success did not erase male hitmakers as a category. The available examples show fluctuation among genres and performers; they do not show a single gender-based replacement driven by gaming.
There is also a crucial difference between pop music and music as a whole. Pop is often used as shorthand for the most visible commercial music, but it is not a complete census of every genre, scene or working musician. Asking why mainstream rock does not occupy the same central cultural role at one point in time is a different question from asking why women can become global pop stars. Combining those questions risks treating them as one problem when they may have very different answers.
Marketing history complicates the “boys and games” premise
Games in the 1990s were heavily marketed toward boys. That history is relevant, and it helps explain why the stereotype remains so persistent. But marketing categories are not the same as the people who play. The later success of Pokémon and The Sims challenged the notion that games belonged to one gendered audience. Those titles are useful reminders that the industry’s assumptions were never a reliable measure of who could find something meaningful, social or fun in games.
That is why Rundgren’s argument feels dated even before reaching its conclusion. It treats gaming as a male diversion and popular music as the thing men allegedly left behind. Yet players are not a single demographic bloc, and neither are listeners. The boundary between the two cultures is even less defensible now than it was in the 1990s.
Major musical artists can be gamers. Major games can be important musical spaces. Fans can move between playlists, concerts, multiplayer sessions and long single-player games without requiring a referendum on what gender is supposed to enjoy which medium. The premise that rock stars and Rockstar Games must exist on opposing sides of an attention war is more rhetorical than analytical.
Female success is not a problem in need of a scapegoat
At the center of the argument is an awkward implication: women becoming the largest artists in the world needs to be explained as a consequence of men doing something else. That framing takes women’s achievement as an after-effect, rather than recognizing that female artists build audiences and careers of their own.
Rundgren has indicated admiration for Lady Gaga, so this is not a straightforward claim that he rejects pop singers or women in pop as such. Even so, the logic he uses places female success in a story about male absence. It suggests women win because men supposedly quit the field or stopped paying attention. That does not give artists much credit for writing, performing, connecting with audiences and becoming cultural events in their own right.
The point becomes sharper in his dismissal of Taylor Swift, whom he said “doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair.” It is an intentionally cutting line, but it does not clarify the proposed relationship between games and music. It instead shifts the discussion from industry patterns to contempt for an individual artist. Criticism of a superstar’s work is fair game; treating her popularity as evidence of a cultural decline is a much weaker proposition.
Fans do not need to agree on Swift, Gaga, Rundgren, Nirvana, the Spice Girls, *NSYNC or any other artist to see the problem. Popularity is not a laboratory result. It does not prove artistic greatness, and dislike does not prove that an artist’s audience has been somehow misled or manufactured by an unrelated medium.
What “causation” means—and why it matters here
The key technical issue is causation. Causation means one factor produces or materially helps produce an outcome. It is more demanding than noticing that two changes happened around the same time. The 1990s saw gaming expand in cultural visibility and saw major changes in popular music. That is a correlation-like observation: two developments existed in the same period. It is not, by itself, evidence that one caused the other.
A stronger claim would need to account for alternatives and contradictions. Why did male acts still thrive? Why did games later reach audiences far beyond the boy-focused marketing of the era? Why should reduced purchasing by one group elevate women rather than affect music spending generally? Why does present-day enthusiasm for games among pop stars—including Gaga—fail to undermine the supposed divide? Rundgren’s theory does not answer these questions.
There is a practical lesson for anyone discussing games as a cultural force. Gaming gets used as an explanation for nearly everything: isolation, distraction, social connection, technology habits, violence, learning, music tastes and generational change. Some questions deserve serious research and careful argument. But “games affected culture” is not a substitute for identifying how, for whom and with what evidence.
When a claim depends on “boys” behaving one way, “girls” behaving another and games functioning as a permanent thief of attention, skepticism is warranted. Those broad labels smooth over the people and choices inside them. They also obscure a more interesting reality: media cultures overlap constantly, and people carry their tastes between them.
Games are part of the music conversation, not outside it
The funniest part of blaming games for music’s alleged decline is that games have long made room for music—whether through soundtracks, musical influence or performers who openly talk about playing. The relationship is not evidence that every game is good for every musician, nor does it mean every player is a devoted music buyer. It simply makes the strict either-or framing impossible to take seriously.
For a useful example of how entertainment technology can create friction without becoming a catch-all cultural explanation, see our look at the trade-offs behind foldable phones. The same habit applies here: identify the actual trade-off, then resist turning it into a universal theory.
Rundgren is entitled to dislike contemporary hits, miss a different commercial ecosystem or argue that rock has lost a particular kind of mainstream influence. Those are recognizable opinions, especially from someone whose career spans so much music history. But blaming games for female pop success turns a complicated cultural question into a gendered grievance with the controller held at the scene of the crime.
Gaming did not make it impossible for men to make popular music. It did not make women successful by default. And it did not create Taylor Swift. What it did do is become one of the world’s major entertainment mediums—large enough that people can keep trying to blame it for changes that require a more thoughtful explanation.
