Rick Beato raises an interesting observation here about how few contemporary bands appear in the charts
I think one of the things he misses is that pretty much all of recorded music is available online. In the past albums would go out of print, unless they were really popular.
The other thing is that contemporary music is so much more competitive, with that many more artists and they don't get the budgets and experience available to previous generations.
(Part of me is amazed at the older stuff that my kids listen to, but another part of me ponders those two points above.)
Another factor influencing their ongoing success might be that by the 1990s many bands had stopped touring material before recording it, which means they wrote and recorded songs without performing them for audiences and missed having that opportunity to fine-tune structures or develop material beyond to be more memorable.
And, yet another idea, the demise of bands fits within a broader trend identified in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, a nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam published in the year 2000. (After all, Regurgitator sang that "Music is sport!")
