Which would explain why bands who are considered by music snobs to have "no talent" go mainstream, while bands who's musicians are totally talented and music is multi-layered and complex don't hit as big. It's not a rule of thumb, just generally how it runs.

It's funny how this wasn't the case for artists of the 60's & 70's. Yeah there's other great old stuff out there, but I've done a lot of digging and found I like older "mainstream" consistently better. Even Velvet Underground had a chance taken on them with a big label.

Big labels have just dumbed down the process of finding artists to take risks on. They want an easy route to easy money. It's not about the music anymore, and I have stacks of records that say it sure as hell used to be,