>Doug, you keep missing the point I made earlier that is not supply of music
>that is limited, but demand. There might be gazillions of new bands,
>alright, but by your own admission, "no one has ever heard of" them. And no
>one has ever heard of those bands, because most people resources devoted to
>music (money and time) are finite and they are being absorbed, for the most
>part, by the Britney-like crap. In other words, the supply side of music
>business is doing fine - but it is the demand side that is getting, uhm,
>more and more monochromatic.
That's just not true. There's more variety even in the top 40 charts now than there was 30 or 40 years ago. Then there were rock 'n' roll charts, country charts, soul charts - and very little crossover. Take a look at the Billboard chart today <http://www.billboard.com/bb/charts/airplay/adult.jsp>: Green Day, Snoop Dogg, and cross-genre collaborations like Nelly/Tim McGraw and Jay-Z/Linkin Park.
The reason that "no one has ever heard of" the more obscure stuff is that it's either known only to locals or to connoisseurs - there are all kinds of cultural microenvironments. Same with TV even - there's more variety now than in the days when the big three networks dominated everything in the U.S.
This narrative of relentless homogenization and decline badly needs some fact-checking.
Doug