There are some wild takes in this video. I think it's more accurate to say this describes the downfall of the rock music industry, as experienced by seasoned professionals like Rick Beato. That's not nothing! I'm a rockist and enjoy Beato's work. But it's hardly the whole art form.

Take the opening claim of the video: the Telecommunications Act of 1996, by deregulating terrestrial radio, allowed consolidation that eliminated competition and killed rock radio and, thus, rock music.

Couple problems here:

* Linear radio was dead by 2000 no matter how the industry was regulated because linear programming sucks and people don't like it. By the time XM and Sirius launched, radio was a medium almost exclusively targeting drive time commuters. To say the Telecommunications Act killed rock, you have to establish that linear rock radio could have survived the iPod. Come on.

* There wasn't meaningful competition even before consolidation. In most markets, a single AOR station and a single Alternative station was all you had before Clear Channel came around. Barber talks about what was lost here, but describes a pretty cynical process of test-marketing bands in Chattanooga and then convincing Nashville and Omaha to give the survivor bands a chance. I believe this worked, and I believe this got some bands airtime that wouldn't have (I assume this is the entire reason I ever heard Live or the Gin Blossoms), but this process couldn't possibly have defined the pre-Telecom-Act sound of the 90s, since many (maybe most?) of those bands were either defaulted in from being in the Seattle scene, or came from the UK.

The death of radio didn't kill rock music. The death of radio killed radio.

Beato claims that within a few years of consolidation, you could look at what was playing on rock radio and see that it was all the same producers using the same equipment and the same samples. I am a little bit obsessive about late-90s alt-rock radio and can tell you that you can find radio station playlists from that era, and check this for yourself. I may not like Blink 182, but I can report that Jerry Finn didn't produce The Red Hot Chili Pepper or Korn.

(An aside: shared producers on contemporaneous popular records also isn't a smoking gun; see: Steve Albini, Flood, and Butch Vig; sometimes, producers just have a moment, and, like the front page of HN, there isn't a whole lot of space for these tracks to spread out in).

Beato has a very Albini-esque take on the points and cuts taken from recording budgets and contracts. Somebody is inevitably going to post that Albini piece. I'll just point out that David Lowery from Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker wrote a very long pseudo-rebuttal to that, and his math checks out: take the (say) $250k the label is nominally fronting for an album, and any sane, generous-to-the-artists set of points and cuts possible, and nobody in a 4-piece band is making an amazing living off the albums. What seems to have been common knowledge is: the bands get advanced money, nobody ever expects to recoup on royalties (even if the labels weren't rapacious, there just wasn't that much money there!), and you made your money touring and on merch, if at all.

What does seem to be the case is that the contraction and ultimate demise of this system of label contracts, producers, studios, and session musicians was really disruptive for people like Rick Beato, who were making their money doing professional artistic services. Fair enough. But when I think of the health of rock music, I don't so much think about whether the label can afford Rick Beato, or a session drummer; the record is a document of the work of the artists themselves, and 70s CBGB scene did just fine producing timeless stuff without label-supported session musicians.

(Another wild claim here: Napster destroyed the $18 CD because the studios were no longer paying for high-quality CDs, so there was only a single good track on an album, because the studios weren't paying to gloss up all 11 tracks. Pretty sure that's not how In Utero worked!)