obviously there are only so many notes and combinations thereof, and people trying to get paid off a product are going to duplicate their successful counterparts. yet there were people who dared to do different things and shunned that type of mentality in the past that still managed to have success. now i think there are fewer, though there are still some. and you cant extricate the music from the music industry in some dismissive way. it's always been kinda dirty and it's always very much shaped eras of music, too. right now it's gotten pretty shameless, despite the proliferation of niches, media outlets, etc.