Woodstock changed it. It went from being small and medium sized venues and two performances a night to bigger sports halls, reserved seating, and big corporate rock shows.
That business model isn’t working so well today (there are some very big bands, many of them decades old restricted to playing their hits from the first half of their career, and some of those song and dance light show extravaganzas with lip synching) but at the smaller end of the scale, there is no ink. Nothing for the local acts. Nothing for the venues that book up and coming touring acts. Just the Livenation outdoor sheds, sports arenas, and their house of blues chain.
Bill Graham was part of the problem. He wasn’t interested in acts that could sell out 3,000 tickets 3 nights in a row, he wanted 10-20,000 in a night.
Up and coming touring acts are starving to death. You are correct. If they did not like playing music they would have quit long ago.
Country music— to quote Tom Petty (who was referring to the FL-GA line band) is “just bad rock with a fiddle”.
There is formulaic country crap music that literally derives from the same beat and melody lines, graphically represented from the studio tracks of the songs put together in this youtube (warning, they are ALL in the same key and beat pattern with equally idiotic pablum lyrics), and that is the “formula”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vapt5C3yDeY
Where do you guys go and hang that you don’t see local bands playing local venues and getting bigger? Or great bands with loyal followings slowly growing through the ranks? It’s all still happening. One example I can think of currently is Coheed & Cambria.