@Mezz 538561 wrote:

Previous decades have had innovations that opened up new ways of making music, The Electric Guitar, Early Synths, Music videos, fully computer generated etc

But from computer generated sounds & visuals there was no where else to go and musical evolution stopped, no need for new specific instruments when a computer can create any sound

You can still innovate with what you have. Music is hardly ever stagnant, even if instrumentation is. That’s why the Jimi Hendrix Experience don’t sound like Nirvana. Likewise just because a computer can generate any sound doesn’t mean people still don’t opt for live instruments.

I’d also say probably the huge diversification of genres has contributed. Music used to be a lot more monolithic in that unless you were willing to dedicate a lot of time to it, you’d know the artists that were either well known or were big in the local scene. Now with the internet and the ease of acquiring digital files and information on artists, there are a lot more niche genres that you can indulge in even if your local scene does not have much of it. Because of this it is even harder to tell what is going to survive in 20 or 30 years time as the “classics” of that era.