@tempestt0st I think there's the obvious answer, that digital distribution has flattened everything, so you get a lot more music and fewer big hits, a lot of bands get popular in a niche. I don't know if figures for this sort of thing are available, but I suspect that singles in the top 40 represent a smaller share of the total market than they did.
Aside from that, Rick Beato had some interesting commentary on this: he ascribes this to a few factors, one being that overproduction (e.g., beat quantization, autotuning, etc.) makes all of the music sound uniform, and another that studios have been taking this extremely conservative approach where instead of signing a large number of bands and investing in them, studios have the songs written by the same people that wrote the hit songs in the 90s and have been consistently writing music that sells. So there's less innovation because every studio hires the same handful of people, and then wants those people to write something that sounds like whatever thing sold last year, and then they wash all the color out of the recording process.
Doesn't the trend follow the way music is / was marketed? I'm thinking that in the 70s and 80s radio and MTV were the main mode of introduction and distribution. There were fewer sources relative to today, and singles were pushed via those sources. If MTV decided to not air any further videos, regardless of how good, you were invisible. Thus, in many cases, broadcasters created one hit wonders by simply not playing new material. The band A-ha comes to mind. They have released 11 albums btw.
I agree that music is generally cookie cutter today, and for the reasons you cited, but it has been for many decades in many genres. Once a recording / writing / arranging technique becomes common, it tends to be used over and over to lower cost to increase yield, and copy cat acts are produced to profit off of the trend.
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