GSS: However, Foster drew from roots Music, and though he attempted to write for money [was not successful at the time, perhaps his songs were not commercial enough?] his commercial situation like the broadsheet writers, was very different from the manufactured and artificially produced pop bands of the late 1990s and early 2000s, these bands are in fact in different situations to sixties pop bands ,most of whom had served their time gigging, beatles stones etc .
Rob Naylor, we wil/ have to agree to disagree.

We will indeed, but, oh, come on! there were as many, probably more, "manufactured" bands in the 60s as there were/ are in the 2000s. Apart from the obvious ones like the Monkees (one or two of whom developed into decent musicians) and the Archies, there was a large number of performers and bands created by entrepreneurs, managers and labels purely to produce commercial returns. Even in the 50s there were distinct attempts made to replaced some of the more "raw" performers like Eddie Cochrane with "safe" (and manufactured) alternatives such as Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka and Neil Sedaka.

The Brill Building in New York was just a massive commercial music factory where Leiber and Stoller, Bacherach and David, King and Goffin etc churned out "hits" to a formula which were fronted by photogenic young "manufactured" artistes (Bobby Vee, Tommy Roe, The Ohio Express, etc ) under the control of Al Nevins and Don Kirchner. That's not to mention the endless succession of manufactured and largely interchangeable Motown artistes.

Manufactured acts are maybe more obvious now, but I'd argue strongly (and from a point of actually having taken the time to explore the genre a bit more deeply than the obvious stuff on prime-time TV) that there is at least as large, if not larger, a proportion of modern pop bands and artistes who serve their time gigging than there were back in the supposed golden days of the 60s.

To equate 60s gigging bands with modern manufactured Boy Bands (you mentioned Boyzone, but they're very old hat now...your example would have had more cred if you'd said "One Direction") is daft. Better comparisons would have been Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, Foals or Maximo Park....all commercially successful non-manufactured bands who came up the hard way.