Recently I’ve read a couple of articles and seen a few charts about the “Death of the Music Industry”. By chance I also saw a question on Quora about why rock music today is so bad (not my assessment but that of the person asking the question). I think both of these topics are very much by-products of the music industry’s evolution. The Internet has increased the velocity of change in the music industry however this change began just about the same time the Internet was invented, back in 1969.
I’ll address the question about rock music first and tie in a broader industry view.
So, first how do you define rock music? This is not an easy answer since the late 1960’s rock has steadily undergone a fragmentation. This fragmentation has been driven by artists who hit barriers in expressing their creativity, barriers that were built based on how rock was defined by “conventional wisdom”.