This thread is one of the best I've seen in a while. Just plain interesting and thought-provoking.
My life enables me to have a very unique point of view on this topic. I'm in my 40s and grew up in the Boston area. I was raised in the music industry, thanks to my mother and her connections. No doubt I've attended thousands of concerts and performed in over 1000. I was in a few bands that opened for some of the best acts of the 90s (my taste leans toward that of Nick1994) as well as in a production role for others. Before I was 18 I was the founding member of a band that eventually got huge, which presented a short-lived legal problem years later when they wanted to release some material I performed on. I still dabble in production in a studio environment as I sold my equipment years ago.
As someone mentioned, the industry and absolutely everything about it has changed. It isn't what it was 10, 20, and certainly not 30 years ago. Digital media has decentralized the business structure from a handful of key financial/management players, to allowing what we used to call "record labels" to be run by anyone with a computer. Stickers, tshirts, and other merchandise, that we used to order by phone or with paper order forms and then wait for turnaround, can now be printed on an affordable laser printer using materials from the local craft store. Online marketing can be shifted to or away from any of a million "scenes"/genres now. Merchandising doesn't have to be only at shows or in chain stores, now we have Amazon for sales, fan forums, fan sites, corporate-level forums for marketing, etc.
As an entertaining aside...a veterans' forum I belong to, perhaps a year or so ago, had a post that said something hilarious along the lines of, "you know you're in a new world when we have steampunk hipster retro-rap bands forming!" That says a lot.
I'd be remiss if I didn't share a friend's band whom I think is one of the most underrated in somewhat recent years. Though they are all but dead, Pimpadelic had a ton of potential but just couldn't find their focus. Tommy Boy Records' A&R saw them as competition for Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock, but by the major label stage of their career they wanted to branch off into more of hard southern rock sound. I believe that's why they failed, trying to appeal to too many genres at once. Management wanted them to pursue the rap/rock line, but the band themselves were moving beyond that stage.
These later songs showcase some of their best musicianship...and the cover song isn't bad either:
