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Survivor Boy wrote:

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What happened? Well, sometime in the late 1990's record companies discovered that you can "manufacture" musical artists. Que up the slew of boybands and teen idols that exploded onto the music scene as well as the shows like "Pop Stars", "Pop Idol", "American Idol" and a slew full of other programs that recognize singing abilities, but not true talent that is something different, unique or innovative.

and that's pretty much the state we're in...

Ummm, yeah. . . I'm pretty sure that happened in the 1950s with Frankie Avalon, Pat Boone, Ricky Nelson, etc. Believe it or not, but teen idols were not invented by Simon Cowell.

The big change started in the mid-70s, when companies realized how much money they could make off of music. Not only that, but they could invest in a handful of mega-bands and forget about the rest. (The same thing was happening in movies after 'Jaws', where the goal was to hit it big with one blockbuster rather than make a bunch of good little movies). By the early 80s, we had corporate sponsorship of the Who and Eric Clapton, and David Bowie was issuing fricking bonds on his back-catalog. In the 50s and 60s, money was made from live performances; records were sold incidentally to advertise the live shows. That started changing in the 70s, and in the 80s and 90s, the big goal was to find bands that could consistently sell a predictable number of albums and generate a predictable revenue stream. Live performances were loss-leaders to sell albums. Bankers love predictability, and bankers run the music industry.

That doesn't mean the music industry is good at predicting those things. When punk went mainstream in the early 90s, the music industry got blindsided. They had been so busy signing corporate rock and hair metal bands that they didn't realize there was this whole 'alternative' to the mainstream music industry that had been growing at the grassroots level. But you see what happened --- there was a rush to sign all these bands they had been ignoring for the past 10 years, and those bands were quickly co-opted into the mainstream (see, eg, Green Day).

Now, music (and TV and movies and every other medium) is about delivering a specific demographic to advertisers. That's why we have such a compartmentalized music scene -- marketers know that rap bands, country bands, emo bands, etc. will appeal to different types of consumers, and they can then sell those bands to particular advertisers. So 'mainstream' is boring because it's designed to be boring -- it needs to appeal to a particular group of predictable people that advertisers can identify and target. New bands, hybrid sounds, innovative music doesn't fit into the MBA's plans until it has proven that it can deliver customers. A&R reps aren't looking for a great sound; they're looking for the next band that can predictably deliver 25-35 year old men who drive SUVs and chew tobacco, or 16-22 year old women who spend 25% of their disposable income on make-up.

I ain't saying it's good, but that's the way it is.