>>126863940 (OP)
mentioning usaid or dei is retarded and you know it
but there was the telecommunications act in 1996, that's what you're referring to, that's what people are feeling when they think something big happened to music in the late 90's/early 2000's. radio was still dominant and the stations were all bought out by the major labels, the act allowed them to now own as many as they wanted. so they consolidated some stations, expanded others, and reformatted radio to be commercial vessels strictly for their own products(artists). the station acquisitions caused this huge wave of label acquisitions and mergers, all of the little labels being taken on as subsidiaries, and the number of major labels going from 6 to 3 in about a decade. the biggest merger happened in 98.
it's difficult to explain the way music was before that, the regional divides, tastemakers. the top 40 wasn't the be all end all of pop culture, if you were a teenager in 1992, you listened to indie by accident, everyone in your circles did too, you all listened to the same stations. music discovery was limited. you were probably pretty well aware of what was going on in most genres. regular normies listened to indie on accident, female artists outside of the top 40 were better because they couldn't skate by solely on looks, different songs sounded different, songwriter variety. bands that barely touched the top 40 were still huge cultural phenomenons in popular culture, which was spread across the board more evenly, pretty much unheard of now. take someone that seems niche and alt like tori amos, nowhere near breaking into the top 40, but the avg person on the street knew of her if they were between, say, 16 and 26. most teenagers didn't even listen to straight pop. "pop" was much less of a homogeneous genre in and of itself anyway. there were so many labels. the barrier to entry on radio or TV was success, instead of these things being a vessel for labels to tell us what's going to be popular
