I speak Italian, I'm Italian and I live here .. I enter into foreign forum for curiosity ...
still my favorite italian singers are: Giorgia, Pino Daniele, Gianna Nannini and Valerio Scanu. Have you ever heard of them?
I'd say three or four years. By then a band will either break up, hit mainstream, or go down the toilet altogether, and in the process alienate most of their original fans. BanRAB outlive their welcome all the time, they're what the music industry hangs onto.
I am yet to see evidence of Bono doing what is commonly known as "putting your money where your mouth is".
His big mouth appears on all the TV stations, telling us what he wants us to do over and over again... while his money is kept nice and safe in Switzerland or Holland.
If you actually...
That seems like a non sequitur to me. It seems like you're addressing a completely different question. If the question is "How easy was it to find good current music during the 1980s?" then yes, the 1980s might lag behind other decades due to much of the best music being non-mainstream and no...
Do we honestly need to classify though? Many artists overlap a bajillion different genres, if they stuck to one genre only, their music would be awfully boring.