I don't think it is fair to blame it all on profits. I look at music as art, the playback or performance is the medium, the tools include the instruments, microphones, recording rooms, effects processors, recording platforms, and so on which the artists use to make the art. Something like a gated reverb was discovered and used by some of the most innovative artists in rock history, and it was very distinct and they loved the result which the public in turn loved.
A good analogy would be the chromatic portraits made popular by Andy Warhol which has been copied and imitated by a multitude of artists even to this day - and borrowed for new things like the Obama poster that Florida artist made. Another good analogy is water colors, a blacker black paint, adding lights wall art, and so on. Remember how Peter Max brought us the bright, multicolored spectacles of his American work in the 1960s? That was copied and imitated and stolen by the hippie movement almost immediately. It is still art.
The same can be said for the Beatles who brought backward recording, tape loops (later adopted by artists like Pink Floyd and Robert Fripp with is Frippertronics), and abundant use of orchestras in rock songs. Just because a sound style became extremely popular by artists who loved that style of sound and used it for a long period, created the sound of an era, doesn't make it a corporate money-grubbing shitshow of trying to cash in on the past. I wouldn't put Lourde in that group of people trying to cash in as much as possible. That simply isn't fair, in my opinion.
I went berserk in a thread not too long ago complaining about the abundant amount of music where there isn't a singer, but a massive chorus of bad singers giving the impression the words were being spontaneously sung by everyone. I hate that sound - I really and truly HATE HATE HATE that sound. But, it was (and maybe still is) popular and someone was buying it and desiring to hear it in great numbers. That is a style, like painting by dumping cans of acrylic color on massive canvases, which defines and artist and sometimes and era but doesn't necessarily define a symbol of greed.
