In this video I get into Billy Corgan’s claim that rock was deliberately “dialled down in the culture,” and I use that as a jumping-off point to ask the bigger question: did rock fade because tastes genuinely changed, or because the industry helped steer it out of the mainstream? I’m not here to go full conspiracy—this isn’t a political channel and never will be—but I do think it’s hard to deny there was a very obvious shift in the late ’90s into the 2000s. MTV is a big part of that conversation: rock being pushed aside, rap and pop becoming dominant, and then eventually MTV moving away from music altogether. From there I zoom out to what I think is the real driver: money and risk. The internet era (Napster, downloads, and now streaming) blew up the old label model, and I think that made bands—messy, opinionated, harder-to-control bands—look like a bad bet. I also bring in Noel Gallagher’s point about the industry not liking “mavericks,” preferring artists they can package and direct. The weird part is that rock still sells tickets and dominates touring (often via legacy acts), yet it barely shows up in mainstream culture. To me, that schism doesn’t feel entirely organic—and I’m genuinely curious where you land on it.