Another of Burt’s many, many hits was “You’ll Never Get To Heaven If You Break My Heart”. Today, his manager might say
“Can you take the word “Heaven” out of it, Burt?”
He probably would have refused.
There was room for both rough and beautiful songs back then.
I’m thinking of David Gates and Bread; “I’d like to make it with you”. So gentle, and melodic. There is probably a good market for that today, but most music producers don’t want to risk losing a few hundred thousand in the investment. Plus, unless the group is ready to tour, it’s hard to make money from songs alone. The songs might be gobbled up and dispersed for free via sites like Spotify.
There is a market today for the type of music you described, but you have to go to Korea to hear it.
KBS World TV is a Korean broadcasting network that features live performances of popular Korean singers on the show “Immortal Songs2”. This is not what’s known as K-Pop, it’s more along the lines of “standards” and similar in genre to what The Carpenters did.
Although the language is Korean, the music is very Western feeling and not unfamiliar like Chinese or Japanese music.
The 2 ladies performing in the link below are the duo “Davichi”. Although they’ve performed many times on the show, the first link is to “Do You Know” and is subtitled.
The second is “The Maze of Love”.
IMO,this is truly singing, not screeching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRATO0IILjE&index=14&list=LLhO5lNQzGvja-olo9AJaPUQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebdpwvEde8E&list=LLhO5lNQzGvja-olo9AJaPUQ&index=8