When do you think music became commercialised?

Look, just because a song uses a few synthesizers and sounds more futuristic than usual doesn't make it "commercialized." If anything, synthpop and new wave in the late 70s were extremely cutting edge and innovative at the time.

I suppose these gigantic hit songs from before the late 70s were "raw" and "organic," due to the fact that they were composed with real instruments instead of those hacktastic drum machines and synthesizers:









By contrast, here are some big pieces of soulless, corporate garbage that became popular after the advent of MTV:

Er, yes it's clearly a new wave song. Frankly, it was one of the first really big new wave hits of the MTV era. It certainly sounds newer than even late 70s rock songs, but it's really not any more artificial or commercialized than "Baby Hold On," "Double Vision," or "Calling Dr. Love." I think it's extremely unfair to call something "commercialized" simply because it sounds MTV-esque, while simultaneously categorizing kitschy artists from the past like Barry Manilow, Paul Anka, and the Partridge Family raw and authentic just because they required help from backup bands instead of DJ's and drum machines for their production and never appealed to the MTV generation.

Well, a lot of bands changed the way they marketed themselves or wrote music by the mid-80s, since the industry was targeting the MTV Generation by then, but then again, that doesn't mean there weren't specific rules and customs that bands in general needed to follow in eras past in order to achieve commercial success. Although I'd probably say the late 60s were a mostly experimental and creative period for music, even on a mainstream level, things such as the disco boom of the mid/late 70s and explosion of teen pop in the early 70s were mostly trend-driven in the same way that 80s MTV new wave was an enormous influence to that decade. If anything, I would really argue that until the 2010s, the early 60s were the most commercialized era for music since the advent of rock and roll, considered how safe, homogenous, and image-centric everything on the charts was.I would say there's so much more to the 80s icons than you give credit for. Saying they're essentially "brands" and "image-focused" first is honestly insulting to their legacies as musicians. Have you even heard Like a Prayer, Thriller, or Faith? Those records are all much more diverse, sophisticated, and daring than your average assembly line kitsch. Just because they're of the pop genre and are closer to today's music than 70s music is doesn't make them less sincere than the pop classics of before.How? I can sort of understand how you'd consider most 80s MTV music more "polished" and "commercialized" than 60s and 70s music, just because music videos were much more integral to the respective band's success, but how on earth is grunge, regular grunge, more "polished" and "commercialized" than 60s and 70s music in general? At this point, you really need to elaborate much more by what you even mean by music being "brands," "polished," and "commercialized," because all that's coming across to me is that you have a major bias towards anything old being "real" and anything new being "corporate," even if you like it.

I notice, too, that as much as you go on and on about how music from the 60s and 70s was so "real" and music from the 80s and 90s was nothing but commercialized commodities, you've never even specifically addressed all the examples I listed of 60s and 70s songs and artists who were very clearly studio-backed kitsch and how they compare to the pop musicians of later eras. Is Nirvana's In Utero seriously more of a polished product than your average record by the Osmonds? Was Prince far more of a capitalist shill than Ricky Nelson ever was? Straight-up mainstream pop idols weren't just the exception back then, they were very much plentiful. Like I noted earlier, the early 60s were frankly just as safe and consumer-oriented as the 2010s are. Higher audio fidelity and advanced recording techniques alone don't make a song more commercialized.

Well, I'm glad you're at least still able to recognize the 80s and 90s as creative eras for music. I absolutely agree the 2000s and 2010s are drastically more commercially-oriented than any musical era since the early 60s.
Not at all. Teen pop in the 60s and 70s was often heavily image-oriented, even with the more limited means of promotion at the time. Ricky Nelson became famous on a television show for his good looks, and bands like The Monkees and the Partridge Family literally came from their own television shows, similar to S Club 7 three decades later (as much as I love S Club 7, they were obviously a heavily branded musical act). Even the Osmonds had their own animated television show, not to mention their brand was so desperate that they handed a hit single to Jimmy Osmond, who was only 8 and a half when he released "Long Haired Lover from Liverpool." Even without MTV, it's very evident that teen idols were shameless commodities back in the 60s and 70s.
The reason I don't consider the mid-2000s to be as commercialized as the early 60s or mid-2010s is because there was much more diversity on the pop charts. Even amidst garbage like "My Humps" and "Grind with Me," the mid-2000s also saw the chart success of songs such as "Take Me Out," "Mr. Brightside," "DARE," "B.Y.O.B.," "Float On," "If I Ain't Got You," "Hey Ya!," "Chasing Cars," "Here It Goes Again," and a whole bunch of wonderful soccer hits from the UK like "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor," "Negotiate with Love," "Push the Button," and "I Predict a Riot." There may have been trash, but there was more than enough fresh and original music from the mid-2000s that they really don't deserve the level of hate you seem to bestow upon them, in my opinion.So, Bay City Rollers, Tony Orlando & Dawn, Leif Garrett, the Carpenters, and 1910 Fruitgum Company were all much more masters of their own destiny in the music world than the King of Pop, Ms. Ciccone, and Britain's biggest solo pop star of the 80s? Of course there was label involvement in even the most revered 80s musicians' work, but you're really exaggerating how much the executives influenced their direction versus personal vision and generational will, especially compared to the commercial pop of decades prior to the 80s.
So, because people remember Nirvana much more than the Osmonds, Nirvana are the ones who were more commercialized? You know what also became a commercialized frenzy? 50s rock and roll. Mid-60s British Invasion music, too. Elvis Presley himself basically repackaged an underground black genre of music for mass consumption by whites, while a huge swarm of popular bands and singers from the mid-to-late 60s were essentially riding the coattails of the Beatles. The Beatles were the hottest investment record stores had in 1964, so anybody influenced by them was essentially riding off a commercialized trend. True, there were some music legends that followed the Beatles who broke boundaries further, such as Bob Dylan during his rock era, or Jimi Hendrix with his impact on the electric guitar in music, but most 60s bands that achieved success did so precisely because their labels groomed them to ride off of what bands such as the Beatles had already popularized.
Prince was a complete original in his sound. True, his tracks were melodically adroit enough to achieve chart success, but there's no way anybody other than Prince himself could've come up with the artistic core of his musical content. Ricky Nelson, on the other hand, had virtually no authority over his creative direction and simply performed whatever his label executives and songwriters handed to him because that was what was popular at the time. Ricky Nelson was popular in the late 50s and early 60s predominantly because teen girl fawned over his charming looks and soft voice, not because he had any artistic genius to back up his projects like Prince, Michael Jackson, or post-Wham! George Michael. As far as I'm concerned, singers like Ricky Nelson were never marketed as authentic singer/songwriters or whatever your logic seems to imply. Corporate pop existed back then just as it has existed ever since.

Grunge itself wasn't genuinely commercialized until post-grunge came along in the mid-90s. Post-grunge emerged specifically to bank off of the influences of the Seattle scene, meaning bands were emulating Cobain, Vedder, Cornell, etc. Early 90s grunge records like Nevermind, Facelift, and Ten were primarily grassroots successes and their singles actually performed worse on the pop charts than songs from the dying hair metal movement throughout 1992 such as "To Be with You," "Let's Get Rocked," and "When I Look into Your Eyes." As far as I'm concerned, that points pretty candidly to how uncommercial their success was; they were selling millions of albums simply because the public at large drove out to pick them up, not because record labels or radio stations were forcing it upon them like they were still trying to promote Def Leppard, Poison, FireHouse, and Extreme, the true commercialized bands of that era.

Bands like Bush, Collective Soul, Candlebox, Silverchair, and Live, however, formed and got famous specifically in the aftermath of grunge and coopted the basic elements most popular from the Seattle Sound. Major labels promoted them much more heavily on mainstream radio, making them more relatively commercialized for the time, even though their sound was far grittier and lyrics deeper than 2000s post-post-grunge bands like Nickelback, Daughtry, Three Days Grace, and Puddle of Mudd.

The Osmonds were a heavily commercialized band in part for the same reasons that mid-90s post-grunge bands were. They were clearly a white clone of the Jackson 5, a group who absolutely dominated the pop charts in 1970, and so MGM Records invested heavily in the group specifically to appeal to a mainstream audience that was, at the time, crazy for the Jackson 5. The spin-off solo careers of the group's members, plus the animated series, only add to the Osmonds' commercialized reputation. If it wasn't for the appeal of the Jackson 5 and artists similar at the start of the 70s, the Osmonds would never have been able to break into the mainstream on sheer artistic ambition alone.
Then why are songs like "Video Killed the Radio Star," "My Sharona," and "Heart of Glass" such dramatic turning points in causing the industry to become more commercialized? Those songs became monster hits before MTV was launched (yes, "Video Killed the Radio Star" went to #1 in the UK in 1979). Up to this point, it seems like your main argument has very much been how music stopped sounding "raw" and instead became "polished," thus "commercialized." As far as I'm concerned, that means you're purely blaming the production of such songs and not the level of artistic ambition. If anything, songs like "Heart of Glass" and "Pop Muzik" were almost to 1979 what the Beatles were to 1964, essentially being a huge new sound that helped drive out a tired, worn out industry banking on repetitive formulas.

Also, if you're going to focus on how the industry got more commercialized due to new wave, then how does that logic match with this?
I suppose you could be trying to imply that the percentage of musicians who were primarily studio-groomed increased from the 80s onwards compared to the 70s. That point I could actually understand, although I would personally argue that there were really just as many manufactured artists in the 70s and earlier as there were in the 80s and onwards, it's just that the most enduring music from the 60s and 70s is the groundbreaking stuff like the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.

That said, however, I'm sort of losing track of what you're specifically referring to between "commercialized" versus "consumer-driven." Don't those two things essentially mean the same thing? Something consumer-driven, by default, is based on what the present industry predicts will be most profitable and most appealing to a mass audience. Commercialism survives off of precisely that; those who follow whatever is most popular most faithfully will, in theory, perform best in a commercial environment.

What actually constitutes consumer-driven music, however, is completely relative to the era. In the early 60s, corporate music was rote 12-bar-blues or 50s chord-driven songs sung by teen idols, as well as dance crazes. In the mid-1960s, corporate music was anything taking cues from the most popular aspects of the British Invasion and Motown music; The Monkees were a manufactured band modeled after the Beatles and became extremely popular during the mid/late 60s.

I also strongly disagree that bands and artists always had more artistic freedom and fewer promotional options prior to the 1980s. Maybe in the late 60s, at the height of the counterculture movement, experimental music had much more of a lease on life, but if your logic held true universally, then I assume artists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dick Dale, Nina Simone, Horace Silver, and Tom Lehrer would have scored plenty of pop hits throughout the 50s and 60s and not just your most conventional, formulaic musicians like Ricky Nelson, Neil Sedaka, Del Shannon, and Connie Francis.