>>Whos Next was my favorite WHO album. I was only 11 when it was released (in 1971) but my sister listened to it so many times I had the lyrics memorized a week later. Still one of my favorites to this day.
>>
>>I actually have it on right now. It falls into my "desert-island" collection. I was only 6, but still remember the neighborhood teenagers playing it.
>>
>>At the risk of sounding snobbish, I look at today's music, and wonder if there will ever be another Who, ELP, Yes, etc.
>
>Forget it. Today's music is crap compared to what we had in those years. So many great bands. Nowadays a band is kinda lucky if they stick together for more than 3 years. There seems to be a lot of one hit band nowadays.
>
>I have a lot of music on my HD. Only a small percentage of those songs were made after 1995.

Make that 1974 in my case :).

The main difference is in the whole world. Back then, the publishers went with the bands and didn't really influence their careers that much; they may have pushed them to do more live performances, or may have asked for a given number of albums per year. Nowadays, publishers are designing the lifetime of a band, and advertise them or not based on their market rating.

There may as well be some potentially good bands like there were then, but they don't stand a chance. They don't get air time, ergo they don't exist.