The problem with the music industry now is that most people listen to what they want to, and blank out everything else. Most genres have their dedicated radio stations instead of only having Radio 1 or 2 to choose from (I listen to 6Music which covers indie, punk, alt-rock and a whole bunch of the more leftfield genres) A lot of people I know listen to the Absolute (****e) chain of stations which just regurgitate hits from yesteryear - how do new bands break in to the mainstream if all people want to listen to is hits from the 80s or 90s? And the kids of these people, all they hear are hits from way back when, so unless they are feeling inquisitive how are they going to discover new bands? If you think back to the days of Top of the Pops it catered for everyones taste - you could have Rick Astley on along with Iron Maiden and the KLF...nowhere mixes all these genres anymore, and if you wanted something like that you'd need to curate your own playlist on Spotify.
Personally, I listen to a lot of music, buy a lot of vinyl and go to lots of gigs - it's my thing, and I've been doing it for years. Discovering new talent and then watching them grow as a band as they develop and push their creative boundaries brings me great joy. For instance, I watched the Murder Capital set yesterday, looked like there were several thousand people in that tent....I saw them in a tent back in 2019 and you'd be lucky if there were 50 people there, but I could tell they would go on to do something. Same with my sons band, when they started out it was just me, my wife and a couple of randoms turning up to their gigs....now they are breaking on to the Glasgow scene and headlining venues that some very big bands have played in the past, but it's been hard work for them to get noticed above the other bands in the city. The music industry isn't what it was, the downfall started with MySpace and Napster, and YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music are all partly responsible too.
