The focus is too much on making a marketable consumable product to make money off of…instead of creating a piece of art that will stand the test of time.
Not completely knocking people making a living off their music…but too many want to be famous musicians just as a low effort get rich quick scheme…as opposed to making a genuine effort to be creative and make something that is a genuine piece art.
Also the rock band lifestyle or the edm studio producer lifestyle because people want to be cool like deadmau5 or insert band here or hip hop rapper…but at some point gotta be more realistic about life.
Also streaming completely changed the industry. It made it better to get out there but harder to make a living off the art.
Those types of vulture exist everywhere, though, and they’re not really limited to just the music industry. You could (probably quite accurately) assume that if they weren’t just churning out some sort of cheap music for mass appeal, they would be doing something similar in another industry.
Whether this really ruins the ‘art’ or integrity of it all is somewhat debatable, though, because ultimately it’s dictated by what the masses genuinely want to listen to. Just because it seems simplified, overly-derivative or formulaic to a lot of us doesn’t really mean that it’s worth any less, even if we know it was just written by the same two Swedish guys who write every other pop song, derived from the last one that everyone loved.
I mean, the best part about having your own, refined taste is that you can just listen to something else. And it definitely makes the gems even tastier.