There are downsides to the streaming revolution. The current arrangements are not ideal if you’re a musician who wants to make actual money from the music you record. But listening to new tracks by new artists has never been easier. Let me check what’s at the top of the list on my favourite review-aggregator site: Foreign Tongues, by The Rolling Stones, Splat!, by Deep Purple, and Confessions II, by Madonna. What? Nothing by someone who can’t remember the moon landing? “You think Keith Richards remembers anything that happened in 1969?” you josh. Very amusing. Have a glass of sherry and a nice sit down.I apologise for including Madonna in this trio. At just 67, she counts as a relative youngster. The surviving members of the classic Deep Purple line-up (I’m saying the ones who played on Machine Head in 1972) have an average age of 79. The still signed-up members of prime-era Stones (we’ll allow Ronnie Wood to join Mick Jagger and Richards in that category) can boast a mean age of 81. This would once have seemed like the stuff of science fiction.We’re not short of strong new records from young artists. Everyone likes that new Olivia Rodrigo LP. Somewhere Good, by the Bristolian experimentalists Tara Clerkin Trio, feels like a future classic. But the presence of those eminent Edwardians (I jest) on the list of new releases reminds us that pop musicianship is, for the lucky ones, no sort of mayfly profession. Rodrigo could well be still releasing records when humans first travel to Alpha Centauri.All three records – like the recent The Boys of Dungeon Lane, by the octogenarian Paul McCartney – have received positive reviews. Few resent the veterans taking up space in the streamosphere. But the unexpected longevity of post-1960s popular musicians does point up the oddness of this career path.Very few have managed to retain an unscathed reputation through early adulthood and deep into late middle age. Van Morrison may have achieved that. Tom Waits came close. David Bowie waxed and waned before releasing two of his best albums in his fragile 60s. [ All Madonna’s albums rated, in reverse order – from unlistenable to sublimeOpens in new window ]Most, however, would admit they enjoyed unequalled heady success early on. For The Rolling Stones, that lasted from their first single, in 1963, until (at a generous stretch) the Some Girls album, in 1978.Deep Purple, the definitive British heavy-rock group, are judged by a much shorter period: from Deep Purple in Rock, in 1970, up to Stormbringer, in 1974. Unfair? Put it this way: all the songs the average fan would demand they play live – Smoke on the Water, Child in Time, Highway Star – were first recorded in that period.The news is rather better for Madonna, who remained vital for close to 20 years. Hung Up, from 2005, still feels like the work of someone riding a momentous wave. Too many of the old-timers, however, spend the vast majority of their careers in a lucrative but frustrating afterlife. It’s that way for Deep Purple and The Rolling Stones. It is also that way for The Who, Joni Mitchell and Pink Floyd. For all the financial success of Wings in the mid-1970s, McCartney knows everything he does will be set beside what he accomplished between 1960 and 1970. I would, perhaps controversially, argue that something similar is true of Bob Dylan. Sure, he has made great records over the past 40 years, but none has the subversive potency of the music he recorded up to … when? Certainly Blood on the Tracks, in 1975. Maybe Street Legal, in 1978.What a strange way to live a creative life. Obviously, novelists, painters and classical composers sometimes lose their way. But this notion of a decade or so of era-defining work followed by a long period playing the early hits to cheers and the new material to polite toleration is very much a characteristic of the pop experience. [ Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals: ‘We’d pick up Dave Fanning and Marty Whelan on the signal from the west’Opens in new window ]Last weekend I greatly enjoyed hearing “the early songs of Elvis Costello” on a sunny evening at the Iveagh Gardens, in central Dublin. Always a clever fellow, Costello knows that, proud as he is of fine recent work, a tour of “the late songs” would be a more difficult enterprise to flog.Yet all those acts keep going. This latest Madonna record is a cracker. The pre-released tracks from Foreign Tongues are up to the high standard of Hackney Diamonds, the Stones’ crunchy album from 2023. We will enjoy the new material. Then we will put it back on the shelf (or click the relevant window shut). In a few months, when we seek those artists’ work, most of us will play Like a Prayer or Exile on Main Street. That’s just how it is.