(via Quora) Answered by Sean Morrison
What killed rock music?
Success, basically.
For a short period, in the late sixties and early seventies, the recording industry lost control of the music for the first time in history. They literally had NO IDEA what would or wouldn’t sell, and they were dealing with musicians who hadn’t come up through the club circuit, so they didn’t follow the script of previous generations of musicians.
Also, a lot of them wrote their own songs! The Beatles opened the doors to bands and performers having the ability (if they were savvy enough) to control their money, though most got outfoxed on that score.
But for a brief period, performers had a level of power and control that had never existed before. The recording industry was literally throwing money at EVERYBODY and letting them do whatever they wanted, because they had no idea what would or wouldn’t succeed.
So you had an explosion of unfettered creativity. Helped that there was probably the greatest collection of talent that had ever existed in popular music just doing whatever the hell they wanted.
But the first generation got rich, got lazy, got egotistical, and gradually started either running out of ideas or actually dying.
Meanwhile, the industry was starting to figure things out. And you started to see, in the late 70s and early 80s, the evolution of bands specifically designed to fit into the industry’s boxes. The whole concept of “commercial” rock became first a possibility, then a standard. New bands were willing to play the game according to the industry’s rules, and the older acts started opting for commercial success over music as an art form.
And let’s face it…after a decade, the fans started growing up and getting more boring. As Greg Allman of the Allman brothers put it, the same people who had dropped acid in the 60s and wanted an hour of Whipping Post all started doing cocaine in the 80s and wanted all the songs under five minutes!
And once the industry sussed it out, every attempt to bring rock back to its radical roots was quickly quashed and made “acceptable.” So punk quickly went from Television to Blondie. “Alternative” quickly found IT’S way “commercially viable” and so on.
So it goes. At least SOME of us got to live through it and watch it die. Those were good times.
Every Moment Has A Song 