So I agree and disagree. I think you can pretty much trace the rise of rock musician salary to the rise of A&R salary and then add 15 years. Alan Freed got filthy fucking rich off rock music; as soon as that became public knowledge, the artists started demanding their share. The whole thing mushroomed and started imploding about the time of Nirvana, when the ethic got completely reversed. Combine that with MP3 and it becomes fundamentally obvious that the true money to be made is in controlling access to music, not making it. Now that you can no longer really control access to music, you can't really make money on it - unless you're talking about licensing, which is still crazy expensive and still a rich person's game. Jeron Lanier also made the point that from about 1890 until about 1985, every generation created its own type of music and propagated it. He argues that this all stopped at rap - the last truly new thing under the sun. I really, really want to disagree with him but I just can't. In particular, I wanted to disagree with him in relation to dubstep - but really, it's anthem techno. It's anthem techno with added weirdness. I say this as a personal friend of Kevin Sawka - I've known his older brother for fifteen years, mixed the first band he was in live and watched that kid grow up. He's always been an incredible talent but I seriously doubt he'd consider himself a visionary. Damn good drummer? Hell yeah. And I fuckin' love getting Facebook posts from goddamn Hammersmith. But dubstep is not to techno what rap was to rock. I went to the first raves, back when they'd mix Skinny Puppy in with the 2Unlimited because there just wasn't enough content to get jiggy with it... and I'm here to tell ya - it's all the same stuff. I can tell you exactly who influenced the "predator" schtick. I can tell you where that came from, too.
I would say dubstep is to techno what punk was to rock. Meaning it was a logical extension of an established genre that reflected the drugs, sex and politics of the era.
Except that punk is a "stripping down" of rock, a de-ornamentation. Dubstep is a "tarting up" of techno - it's pure ornamentation. Nobody makes Goa Trance anymore because its logical progression basically hit "Industrial" and stopped. I mean, it was ornate, sample-heavy, bleepy and angry: The bands that are left are basically pure industrial at this point. Juno Reactor went from this: To this: Dubstep? Dubstep takes the corner of Jungle that Goldie and Squarepusher stripmined to death and beats it like a dead horse: