OK, you can define it yourself; it's your term. Clearly listeners do have way more choice than they used to, in music and in video.
I'm not sure I'd even agree that the 1996 act "killed" rock. I don't think you would argue that the enshittification of radio (my term /s) helped anything, though.
Rock isn't dead, either. A few questions related to that, though, are:
"is swing dead?"
"is ragtime dead?"
"is bebop dead?"
For all of those, the art form developed about as far as it could, and tastes changed. If I listen to modern rock, I don't hear much that surprises me, and as Sting said in his Beato interview, if I don't hear something surprising pretty quickly, that's it for that song. Most of what I hear, I think, "yeah, I've heard stuff like that before."
Actually, I think the death of radio very plausibly improved rock music! In the mid-90s, Q101 determined a lot of what I was listening to. By 2002, it was Pitchfork† (for better or worse, not a week in my life goes by where at some point I do not hear the words "I am Ringo, elephant of Beatles worship" in my head). I probably got more good bands from Soma.fm Indie Pop Rocks, which I only followed for like 3 months, than I got in a decade of listening to the radio.
Kurt Cobain wrote "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" because of the dynamic Beato is euologizing here. Long before Clear Channel, Modern Rock radio was mostly about sanding down the edges of acts and finding ways to make success repeatable; it took the Meat Puppets that wrote "Oh, Me" and made them write "Backwater"; took Pearl Jam and ground it into the Stone Temple Pilots, and finally into Candlebox. The Candlebox discography doesn't lie: it happened to us before the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Watch the video again. Beato really does blame the decline of rock on labels no longer paying to make more of the tracks on an album good. Come on, that is a genuinely weird thing to say, isn't it?
† I am aware of the arc of quality that Pitchfork traversed since the early 2000s.
I'm not sure I'd even agree that the 1996 act "killed" rock. I don't think you would argue that the enshittification of radio (my term /s) helped anything, though.
Rock isn't dead, either. A few questions related to that, though, are:
"is swing dead?"
"is ragtime dead?"
"is bebop dead?"
For all of those, the art form developed about as far as it could, and tastes changed. If I listen to modern rock, I don't hear much that surprises me, and as Sting said in his Beato interview, if I don't hear something surprising pretty quickly, that's it for that song. Most of what I hear, I think, "yeah, I've heard stuff like that before."