Digging deeper into the death of great music

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I'm doing these to keep my blog alive while I'm not writing about writing. But also I've always been fascinated by the death of great music, and I think understanding what happened to it will help explain what happened to everything else like movies, traditional publishing, illustration art, comic books, etc. All this amazing art was being produced when I was younger, all the time. We didn't even realize it was a golden age (people never do until it's over), we just took for granted it was always like this and assumed it always would be. And then it all just went sploot.

Little by little we're learning what happened now, and it's pretty close to what I think we all suspected. Corporations got too big. Bill Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, conglomerating all the power into the hands of just a few companies, and as a result live music came under the control of the big record labels rather than the people running the venues (bar and club owners). And no longer were the bands in control of the music they were allowed to make or how it was going to sound. Control passed from the artists to the boards of directors.

Not only was there "No money to be made" from creating great music anymore, but they had wiped out the whole infrastructure. There was no longer a massive corporate culture built around and supporting the creation of great music, or a viable radio outlet for it. When the people in charge aren't artists but corporate CEOs with their eye on nothing but money the artistry dies.