> Cobain was such a tragic roman candle of talent,

Cobain's suicide was a result of uncomfortable fame, struggling with heroin addiction, but especially clinical major depression. If you consider that LA since the dawn of the record industry always had a massive music scene, and performers there always had considerable talent, with many were jaded because success and notoriety is in many instances very arbitrary and so difficult to obtain in a such large pool of highly talented and technically proficient musicians... then why Cobain out of Seattle? He was not any more talented than any professional unsigned musician in LA during that era up until today. Cobain, though he could compose, sing and play well (like so many others), was extremely attractive, and I think his comeliness, his piercing blue eyes and blond hair, is what set him apart to Geffen and the teenage girls that usually drive record sales.

> Somehow I suspect industry economics have changed in a way that I don’t think rewards elite producers assembling great albums, although digital tech lowers the cost and great sounding stuff still happens.

Definitely, but low fidelity sounds even worse on the radio, so they are passed over by radio programmers. The techniques of high fidelity production have long solved the issues of not knowing how the sound is going to be reproduced after being broadcast to individual receivers. Car radios and home component systems vary widely in their quality. Somehow Hotel California still sounds pretty good on a crappy radio. That is the trick, and that is why production is so expensive, because it transcends the limitations of the end-unit receivers, and that takes a skilled engineer and a lot of time, and the more skilled, the more in demand and the more expensive their time becomes. High Fidelity and skilled producers and engineers, regardless of analog or digital tracking, are still required to get wide radio adoption. LoFi comes to us through means other than broadcast radio, by seeing an act, and buying the record, and through download sites like iTunes, Amazon, Zune Marketplace, Rhapsody and venues like YouTube, but usually not radio. Once playing on radio stations in major cities, record sales immediately follow. LoFi is more organic and word of mouth, thus there is far slower adoption. I think without airplay, Nirvana could not have achieved "overnight" success. Fame would still have occurred, just much, much more slowly.

And staling fame is often a tactic. Bands have only so much time, so much energy. Once the whole nation wants them, the art itself becomes more difficult to produce, because of the distractions of fame taking up all their time. If it is clear from isolated performances that fame is inevitable, and they are generating plenty of revenue, a band may forgo marketing singles altogether, and only get on the radio once the secret finally gets out, and they have enough money to isolate themselves from manic hoards. Both DMB and Phish were incredibly popular among their growing fan base long before they released any singles for radio play (which, again, were high fidelity professionally produced recordings, and not the low fidelity bootlegs that everyone was collecting).