Did rock music die in 2012?

I really enjoy Rick Beato’s videos (if you haven’t watched any of them before you can find them on his YouTube channel) and this one got me thinking:

I spend a lot of time, and have frequently spoken out about the ‘lottery of birth’ (as evidenced here or here) – the idea that how, when, and where you are born plays a huge role in where you end up. Sure, there are many cases of people who ‘rose above their circumstances’, but there are even more untold stories of people who spend their lives desperately dreaming of being able to do something other than expend all their energy just on surviving. They would love to have the time or energy to be creative but many times they are up before the sun to get things ready for their family, spend hours commuting on public transport to get to their job – which is often a physical one that further drains their energy, only to spend another couple of hours commuting back home where what is left of their waking hours is again consumed by family responsibilities and the desire to gety to relax for just a few minutes to recover from the day and recharge for the next one.

Just imagine what these people could do if they had ‘leisure time’, as American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, Stephen Jay Gould said: 

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”.

Rick’s video is less to do with the lottery of birth than the cost of living and how things are a lot more expensive to do than before but the two tie into each other and, if anything, the fact that life has become so much more expensive will only have exacerbated the problems brought about by the lottery of birth rathe than alleviate them! It as also attracted a fair amount of criticism from many people, including those who say that his assertion that there has not been any good rock music made since 2012 is 100% wrong, but I think the basic premise holds true – as life gets more expensive more people are priced out of the creative arts industry and only those who have a ‘safety net’ can afford to try and fail like many of our favourite artists of the past could.

What do you think?