About a hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton complained that men no longer sat around a table and sang; they sat and listened to one man sing, "for the absurd reason that he could sing better". That was when the rot began -- before television, before radio, before phonographs. I think, proximately, the cause of it was urbanization, which provided new opportunities to orchestrate & exploit the base motives of people in crowds for commercial gain.