Always been the case. I have a late boomer early Gen x friend, who will insist that music was better back in the day, and that everyone was listening to Zeppelin and such, and nothing else. You can pull up the billboard charts for any year he waxes about and read off the top n, and rarely if ever find a track from the bands he claimed "everyone listened to."

Survivorship bias is and always has been real. If you don't believe me, think about the last time you heard Tubthumping from Chumbawumba on the radio or in a commercial

Don't disagree with that survivorship bias isn't real, everyone thinks the music of their time was the best. Still it's not the only factor at play here, because the music industry was in crisis in the early 2000's and its revenue dropped in half. That is a huge drop, and the less money in the industry, the smaller the pie that goes towards all types of projects, from Tubthumping to Smashing Pumpkin's Rocket.

But do agree that most of the 90's was still pop music (just looked at through the top 100, forgot about most of those groups:)

Are you talking about the billboard hot 100 (singles)? The billboard 200 (albums) seems like what you might expect. e.g. I believe Led Zeppelin never had singles but they had 2 number one albums in 1970.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_200_number-o...