no, listen.

i don't understand why anybody who is not a musician (or maybe a poet) would listen to rock music in 2019. the larger social decline of the guitar should be interpreted as a bottleneck in the genre. that doesn't mean you need to sound like steve vai, and i'd actually rather you didn't. but, so long as the instrument exists, it is going to maintain an audience around it...

the whole "rock music will never die" thing is bullshit. it's been on life support for decades. but, what the death of rock music should mean is the death of boring rock music - catchy rock music, popular rock music. and, to that, we should all sing "good riddance".

let the thugs listen to hip-hop and the idiots listen to techno and the teenage girls listen to pop. fine. great. it opens up the space at the rock bar for more guitar music, even if the rock bar shrinks in size. and, that's fine, if it does.

what that means is that you need to play, or go home.

there's no audience for pop rock anymore, regardless of how you're doing it; the audience that remains is focused on lyrical prowess and instrumental virtuosity and has a lot of overlap with prog and jazz.