Ships of Theseus

Mark E. Smith ran The Fall from 1976 until his death in 2018, and his hiring policy was the stuff of legend — "If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's The Fall," he liked to say. The database agrees with the granny clause. Here is every dated stint MusicBrainz records: one bar that crosses the whole chart, and everybody else.

Thirty-nine dated musicians across forty-six stints (five undated stints omitted), and a churn rate that turns the chart into sediment layers: the pre-Brix post-punk strata, the mid-80s pop lineup, the late-90s collapse — the 1998 New York tour ended in an on-stage fistfight and an entire band quitting, visible above as four bars all snapping off in the same year. Note Karl Burns: four separate stints, fired or fled each time, the record for optimism in the face of evidence.

Groups with no founders aboard

The Fall at least kept its founder. The graph can find working bands that lost all of theirs — groups whose founding-year members have every one departed while the name sails on:

• The Drifters are the archetype: 74 members since 1953, zero founders since 1958 — when manager George Treadwell, who owned the trademark, famously fired the entire group and hired a different vocal quartet to be The Drifters. The ship was rebuilt in an afternoon.
• Napalm Death turned over so fast that nobody who played on side A of their 1987 debut Scum appears on side B except bassist Nik Bullen — and he was gone within months. Every member since 1989 joined a band containing no founders, and Shane Embury, the longest-serving member (1987–present), arrived five years after the founding.
• Canned Heat has sailed since the deaths of Alan Wilson (1970) and Bob Hite (1981) under the drummer who joined in 1967 — sixty members deep.
• Little River Band is the pop-law classic: the Australian founders lost the name to later members and today's band shares no musicians at all with the records that made it famous.

The full computed list runs to hundreds of active groups. Its top is honest about what it measures: alongside the rock cases sit Japanese and Thai idol franchises (BNK48, 櫻坂46, モーニング娘。) where total membership replacement is not an accident but the product design — the group as perpetual institution, graduating members like a school. A Pete Frame family tree of AKB48 would be a conveyor belt.

One caveat cuts both ways: a "vanished founder" sometimes just means MusicBrainz hasn't dated a reunion stint. The measurement reports the paperwork, and paperwork, like drummers, goes missing.

Method: all `member_of` stints with begin/end years from MusicBrainz membership relationships. "No founders aboard" = active group (no end date), ≥8 all-time members, where every member whose stint begins in the group's founding year has an end year on all of their stints, and at least two current members remain. Computed August 2026 against the 2026-07-25 build.