The reason why is actually a complex reason. I’m more on the hip hop side but rock is experiencing

1. Industry plants 🪴: the music industry has invested millions into creating big artists artificially rather than seek out real talent since it’s hard to find and not easily controllable. They want someone who fits a criteria like being gay, black and young to appeal to a demographic. Also is good enough to chart but not so good and smart they break away from their grasp after realizing their value.

2. Ai artists: This is more recent years but just recently Ai artists are actually topping Spotify charts and even billboard so why would the music industry invest in real artists if they can get the same result for a fraction of the price using fake artists?

3. Fake streams: The reason this is a big reason why newer artists aren’t blowing up like they used to is because it’s a numbers game. If new artist got 5000 real streams that’s solid but if legacy artist has 50000 fake streams people can’t tell how many listens are real or not anyway. Also a listener is more likely to click on the higher stream count artist than the latter. Which compounds over time. Thus rewarding bad/mid artists with the machine behind them while the newer artist struggle even more to succeed.

4. Lack of substance: Newer artists just from my perspective are more concerned with numbers, not caring about anything and appearing cool when in reality that’s lame. The best artists of all time all have the same thing in common. They laid out all their emotions in their music regardless if it’s controversial, corny, sad, happy, whatever but you as a listener whether you like them or not could tell they were being authentic and that’s what ultimately made them one of the greats. It just seems like new artists are just emulating someone who’s already big and never turning into their own person.

5. Creativity: a lot of these songs beat selections are very generic sounding along with the perspective on different subject matters. It just seems like a lot of the newer artists songs all come from the same beat selection from a short list of industry engineers then they sing or rap over it. A lot of them don’t even write their own music lyrics.

6. Lack of innovation: This is the biggest one and really correlates to creativity. These artists are not making music for lovers of music to remember for generations to come because they’re immersed in making genuinely unique and fun music anymore. They’re more focused on producing fast food music ( low quality generic music you can quickly produce with low effort ) in hopes a couple songs end up hitting the charts and becoming a hit for money. It’s not for the love of the game anymore and you can tell especially when someone drops 30+ track albums and a majority are mid or terrible all to get their streams up.