This is just kind of rubbing salt in a bloody gaping and potentially infected wound but I just found the timeline of when the mainstream radio faction went from "mostly sucking" to "sucking big time".
All you need to do is look at the track listing on the
Big Shiny Tunes releases from 1996 to 2009. For those not aware,
Big Shiny Tunes is a yearly Canadian compilation of what was most popular on the radio for that year. Because it's a Canadian publication there are a lot of bands who mostly got famous on Canadian radio but it's not exclusively Canadian.
Big Shiny Tunes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Just look at the tracklistings on the wiki, from 1996 to 1999 it was pretty good, even 2000 was decent, but then look at the one from 2001...