too true zeta.
most of what i have sought in music in the last several years is low/no budget produced at home with your comp.
the industry left the people, not the other way around by pushing drugs/gang/killing music <--I use the term loosely. while ignoring what we want to hear.
Well, a couple of things happened.
First off, it wasn't until the mid-20th century that people actually started buying into the idea that rock and roll bands should be
richer than God. The best guitar player on Earth in 1650 was probably living off whatever sort of monitory donation could fit into his hat. Despite this, music was probably even more valuable to people back then. Therefore, I consider the whole concept of music being highly profitable, or maybe even sustainable as a full time job, to be a historical aberration. If Aesop Rock can hold a day job then shitheads like Jay Z sure as hell better be able to.
Then there is the act of recording itself that has changed. In 1970 you actually did need full time engineers and expensive studios and such to make something like Sgt Pepper. Nowadays...not so much. What can be done at home on $5000 worth of gear is incredible. "Studio time" was once a huge thing, largely in the hands of labels, now its barely even relevant.
Another thing: there is more dumb shit to spend your money on. The service plan for an iPhone is $100 a month. That's money that would have gone towards music in the old days. Then we have Gameboy, cable TV, video games, etc...there is only so much money to go around, and the other stuff evidently seems more worth paying for these days.
Another huge factor was the ever increasing drive of corporate greed. In 1980, when I was a little kid first building by collection of singles, labels would actually market singles, and singles themselves made money. By the 90s singles were greatly de-de-emphesized. Some bands can make a great single and disappear forever (see: most of the Motown roster) some excel at albums (Genesis, Pink Floyd, Weird All), and both sorts of acts have their place in the world. The labels just wanted to sell albums though since that meant more revenue. By making singles almost totally unavailable they would force you to buy the entire album. If this was an album from The Cure that's not such a bad thing. If this is an album from Jennifer Lopez...you just paid $16 for 14 songs you hate and one you like. The push to fill all 80 minutes of a CD didn't help either. That's asking a LOT from even the best performers. All that filler may make the album seem like a better deal, but Unknown Pleasures is only 39:24 and every year a new batch of teenagers discover how great this record is.
So into this clusterf*ck enters Napster, or Kazaa, or Bit Torrent, or whatever, and the labels are instantly f*cked. The majors weren't making this music available to us, they were holding it ransom. If a 13 year old has a choice between spending his month's free money on a Smashmouth CD that he only wants because of one song, and downloading it for free and spending that money to see whatever shitty Disney Movie features that song, then the choice is clear. If the label wanted that money, they should have sold him just the song he wanted for $4.
Now with iTunes we can (usually) buy the songs one at a time, but the problem is that the bands the labels have been promoting the most heavily for the past 20 years are singles acts. They keep selling old Beatles songs because they have no idea who the next Beatles are, and they don't want to spend the money and time finding them or the culture to support them. They've turned music into such a low buck commodity there is no wonder people don't want to pay for it.