[soylentcola]

> I couldn't get into Nickelback personally because they came in on a wave of similar music that I was generally over by the time they got big.

I feel like that's often part of it. Something that represents peak (whatever) in terms of a sound. The sort of highly-polished result that almost sounds like it was AI-generated by a model trained on exactly what was popular over the past few years.

Of course, you don't need AI to do it - just slightly more human and manual analysis of trends, sales, marketing, and production techniques.