Media saturation and playlist power prop up a celebrity production line that has forgotten how to find and use great music. Instead, they invest in the same pop formula for the next wave of 10 year olds, the same sub-porn for adolescents and the same faux-punk for college. Music in the rest of the world has a million different flavours and real passion.
Technology, fashion and ideas change but the music industry invents nothing. A billion and one genres (jazz, swing, bluegrass, rock and roll, progressive, punk, rap, hip-hop, etc., etc.) have been created by the man in the street. The music industry always arrives just in time to fire up mass production. It never leads.
Fashion defies control and prediction. There are no absolute genres, just changing shades of taste. The tradition of music is bigger than the product-driven, culture-lite, post-modern, low-attention-span industry hype. I don’t think the next generation is stupid or that all the good songs have been written.