The Decline of the Music Industry

True there, @bob540 and kinda vapid post-Kardashian twerking, etc. but remember the Elvis hip grind was considered too risqué for TV back in the day? Sex definitely sells. It's certainly part of the appeal of music videos going back to the MTV era and earlier. With music delivered as part of an entertainment "package" of dancing, effects, etc., you aren't necessarily being asked to listen to the music, or the vocal abilities of a singer. (Perhaps that's one reason I don't listen to as many female vocalists these days as I did 20 years ago). 
At bottom, it's a business. And as someone pointed out above, there are the innovators and then the followers, hoping to cash in on a trend. Which leaves the A&R department (if it exists and isn't an algorithm at Big Data) trying to come up with something that is the same but different. That too was characteristic of the "good old days"---Doug Sahm was cast as a British Invasion rocker to garner radio time, but he wasn't a Brit and was actually pretty talented. 
I think we have all these niches these days, which may be a reflection of the society we live in. I won't use the "diversity" word, because it conjures up the social justice issues now associated with the term, but what I get a big kick out of is young people discovering old stuff for the first time. And for them, it's genre agnostic-- they can go from country, to metal, to jazz, to hip-hop. 
In some ways, that's cool, and contradicts the siloed nature of genre slicing. 
I know with friends that we have overlapping musical tastes like a Venn diagram-- areas where we share an interest and areas where I'm interested and they aren't and vice-versa. The biggest challenge for me in the last 10 or 15 years was to expand my musical horizons beyond my "comfort zone." I still can't get my head around some free jazz---it's just too cacophonous, but I've definitely become more accustomed to, and enjoy music that would have been too out there for me at one time. 

Nobody was ever able to predict what would hit. There were some notable record men (I can’t think of any women who ran labels back in the day) who had a good ear, or were artist friendly. Mo Ostin at Warners in the ’70s built a substantial empire, and those young guys he hired produced some great records. That company was regarded as artist friendly. Chris Blackwell was adventurous in his musical tastes and signed a lot of different acts that helped define the sound of several different genres: from Crimson and Tull to Bob Marley (throw in Traffic, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, U2 and a whole catalog of others). He was regarded not as a suit but as a guy who respected the artist. There were others.
There was always a tension between the artist side and the bean counters. That was true in the cigar chomping days and was true even during the late ’60s. The ’70s seemed to reflect a shift from London to LA and the singer-songwriter scene (I’m leaving out The Band, who were regarded as musician’s musicians by many and did sell records, but that whole LA mob become a "thing" in the ’70s). I kind of dropped out in the ’80s-- I listened to everything from Bad Brains (Rastafarian punk played by fusion guys out of DC to audiophile crap. I really didn’t have time for music because I was working in a profession that serviced the music industry. Most of the people I dealt with were suits. Artists who made big money had day to day lawyers, agents, managers, PR people, personal assistants, and almost all the folks who serviced them had lawyers, accountants, PR people and personal assistants.
The bottom dropped out finally in large part due to a combination of things, not the least being the Internet and the ability to file share, the reliance on catalog and established artists rather than the risks associated with new acts (although I gotta say, I remember in the ’80s how much money was thrown at totally unknown artists to fund them through advances). There was push back against "the industry" that kind of peaked during the Napster era and by that time, the industry was effectively gutted. They weren’t selling as much in the way of physical inventory, albums weren’t even released on vinyl in the US-- you had to buy an EU pressing to get some stuff if you were into new music and there were so many other diversions for the youth market, including Internet gaming.
Music was no longer a thing you focused on as an activity but something that got played while you did something else. It was a cheap commodity, made cheaper by how it was delivered. The expectation of "free" music made it hard to compete. It became even more niche as we turned the millennium.
I don’t pretend to completely understand any of it, though I witnessed it, was part of it in some ways and have some ideas about how music reflects culture and how culture can change music. Can music change culture? Yes. I think so.
In a way, and this is way beyond the scope of the thread, I think we are between epochs; we have lost some or much of the old, and the promise or potential of the new has not been fully realized. I had hoped to be driving a jet car by now, based on watching the Jetsons in the ’60s. The younger generation? Man, I know a guy-- thirties- majored in music in school, plays, but not for a living--huge knowledge of jazz, eclectic modern stuff, old school funk, etc. We trade listening notes.
I can still get excited firing up a record I haven’t heard or listened to in a long time. That, at this point, is largely what it is about for me, but I’m from an older generation of audiophile/listener. We’ve been talking about the death of the high end audio industry for decades, but through thick and thin, it’s still there. Stuff changes. C’est la vie.