Depends if you think making money is an agenda or not,

One of the most successful boy bands of the 90s.
And yes they were frequently seen in videos with no shirts on, sexually suggestive poses and all the rest of it. Hell they even got them playing in gay clubs in little leather outfits to try to appeal to that audience early in their career. And it wasn't just them, there were plenty of others doing it.

Because that's what selling, how many more times does this need pointing out.

You're not forced to accept it at all, I could hardly tell you a single song any of these people you're referring to because I spend my time concentrating on the stuff I like, and they're not ONLY promoting those acts, they're giving them the priority of the marketing because they make the most money.

Not only that they're also more malleable than 'proper musicians' because the record companies also supply the producers and the songwriters to these acts too.

There's no agenda, it's just profits.

But they've always wanted us to accept whatever pop stars they tried to shove down our throats. However different their practices might be over the years they still have the same MO that they've always had: make the dummies buy our ****. Just because they may have had better or more diverse artists doesn't mean they cared that they were better or more diverse. They only cared that Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones made them money. It's not an "agenda", it's just cynical business practices. Sure they use subliminal messaging to get you to buy stuff, but calling it an "agenda" makes it unnecessarily sinister. Business is business, and expecting it to work otherwise is irrational.

That is not true. I am not even sure why you brought them in this conversation. During their era's there was way more variety playing on the radio, playing on MTV as well as selling out stadiums and winning awards.

MJ took 4-5 year breaks between his projects and people LOVED him. They were not forcing people to like him.

The industry NOW is completely different.

I'll believe you when you say it, but realize it can be easy for people to get confused when you seem like you take so much offense to who the industry chooses to promote.

I don't know what I can add to this that hasn't already been brought up. I think it's probably as simple as, in the case of Monae, that from a purely economical standpoint, her label has concluded (not necessarily correctly) that there is more money to be made on prioritizing other artists. They don't take into account how popular an artist "deserves" to be (whatever that may mean).

Oh, and the part about "economical hardships" was a rhetorical question to get my previous point across.

Bowie: Infinitely better in the 70s (As Urban mentioned, he did "dumb down" his music in the 80s for more commercial appeal.)
Prince: Don't know his material all too well, but as far as I can tell his No. 1 singles could be considered some of his "safest". I really don't know much about promotional history for these though.

My point was that the record companies didn't care how much artistic merit either of those artists had any more than they care about Beyonce or Nicki Minaj. Their basic mentality is the same as it's always been.

Your argument was that the industry ONLY marketed MJ and The Rolling Stones which is not accurate.

Tina Turner, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Bruce Springton, Bon Jovi, Prince, David Bowie, Elton John, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Earth Wind and Fire etc were selling out stadiums, charted the charts and won awards during their eras so your argument that they were the only artists being marketed is pretty ridiculous when there was an variety of acts to choose from.

unlike today where

Beyonce, Rihanna, Katy, Gaga, Taylor Swift, Nikki, Jay Z and Kanye are the only pop stars being marketed.

I think you're taking his comment far too literally. He was giving examples, not the complete list of everyone the labels supported.

Yeah, this.

Daft Punk, Justin Timberlake, Michael Buble, Drake, Imagine Dragons, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Mumford & Sons, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Lorde.

All acts that have sold over million last year all that have been well promoted, there's your variety of acts in the mainstream.

Btw about the sexualization of the modern pop market:
I think this has a lot to do with the rise of YouTube and similar websites, which have become the main media through which music videos are viewed. The artists' official channels are monetized so that the money made from the music videos are calculated through number of views. Before sites like YouTube came into prominence an artist wouldn't make more money from having a lot of people watch their music video; it was merely a promotional tool. But with the monetization system, on the other hand, you bet a video with Nicki Minaj's butt in the thumbnail is going to get clicked on a lot merely because of that. Many people are also more likely to watch an overtly sexual video all the way to the end just on account of its sexiness, making the label the highest amount of money from each single view, so in these cases, the music no longer is the most important thing, since the main function of the music video isn't to promote the music that goes along with it. So in short, the noticable increase in sexualised music videos can also be tied in to a question of economics.