Dan Flynn nails it over at The American Spectator:
We use our futuristic devices to play ancient music. Starting sometime in 2012, catalog albums outsold new releases (eighteen-months old or younger) for the first time since Soundscan began tracking sales. When stale tastes better than fresh, something’s gone terribly wrong with the market where you shop. …
What do we bequeath in 2014’s time capsule? The dearth of truly popular and remotely cultural pop culture is enough to make one feel sorry for posterity employing postmodern technology to relive the early 21st century.
The past regarded nostalgia as a mental illness. We experience it as a normal aspect of contemporary life. What does this say of our collective health?
Our preference for Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” over Frank Turner’s “Tape Deck Heart” isn’t an indication of the superiority of the past to the present. It merely demonstrates the choke that memory lane holds over current creativity. Great is out there. But you have to look in spots that are really out there.
Progarchy 
As the last paragraph suggests, you have to dig a little deeper to find the music you like, as the large record companies won’t promote it to the masses they way they did with something like Rumours in the 1970’s. In general, the music promoted to the masses today through the old mechanisms in my opinion really is inferior to what was promoted through the same channels in decades past, and those that don’t look for good music through alternate means (as we do here) are force fed a bunch of crap, and that’s one reason why sales of back catalogs are exceeding new releases.
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Good point. don’t think it’s the whole story, but Frank Zappa (one of those “out there” types who somehow got picked up and supported by a major label) has something of a point here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0 In this case, I think Zappa’s closer to the truth: it has more to do with Frank Turner being completely unpromoted (I’d never heard of him until this post) and Rumours having been massively promoted in its day than with any “nostalgia trap” (although many people do fall into that trap, make no mistake).
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That’s just it though – a record company picked up Zappa and promoted him. That wouldn’t happen in this day and age. The record companies that still engage in mass marketing never pick up acts like Zappa, or for that matter something comparable to Led Zeppelin or The Who, nurture them and promote them until they really hit it big. Nowadays, those same record companies won’t do that, instead creating “artists” like Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber, shaping them down to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the greatest number, and then promoting the heck out of them. And I suspect most people aren’t as willing to dig as deep as readers of this blog are in pursuit of good new music, whether they like good music or not. Hence their turning to back catalogs instead of new releases.
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