I agree. Other things are going on. Rock has long been in decline, the social messages and trends U2 focused on 30-40 years ago have passed, and U2 is no longer breaking new musical ground like they were from the late 70s until Pop.
As a lifelong rock fan, it's really been sad to live through the long slow inexorable decline of the genre. The vast majority of current popular music doesn't appeal to me at all, which simply wasn't true even as recently as the 90s.
I think the machine that leveraged interest and controlled attention for so long through radio, magazine, videos, and festivals has basically failed and young people have turned away from guitar-based rock.
My teenaged kids have no interest in what I listen to, with the possible exception of Queen, and I think that has more to do with the biopic than organic discovery.
I won't argue that young people are turning away from guitar-based rock, but I'm not seeing the connection between that and the changes in the popular music machine. Are you implying that people would not have liked guitar-based rock this entire time if not for said machine? That the natural state of things, which we're now reverting to, is to prefer other types of music? I think it's more just that tastes change and go through cycles, and guitar-based rock is on the decline (and might or might not recover; there are so many dead dead dead musical genres and instruments out there).
