i'd say it had more to do with a shift from something artistic and personal towards almost everything corporate and material... certainly the video age helped to usher this in... (cue madonna [1983] and Rolling Stone's 'Hot Issue' [1986]...)... as an artist, if you weren't willing to completely sell yourself out or if you looked like joni mitchell or billy joel you either needed really great videos, really great songs, or both (Paul Simon's Graceland, Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever, Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms, Peter Gabriel's Us, etc.)... once madonna and the boy band shit really kicked in it became near impossible for more and more bands to survive, at least on the radio and the mainstream charts, and especially in the age of downloadable music, where stealing became synonymous with sharing... you had to be neil fucking young, man; the david baerwalds in the mix got swallowed by the cracks and before long were online pawning off limited-edition masterworks like Here Comes the NFU for 20 bucks a pop...