I think rock music, if it got airplay, would be doing so much better. The Clear Channel mentality is to keep spinning the classic rock "gold". Over and over the same set of songs. DJ's really don't exist. My local radio station will have a post asking for new music on there Facebook. They ignore. XM had The Boneyard years ago run by Kevin Kash. He was old school. He had an hour show with new music. If the feedback was good it was entered into rotation. Then they changed the format. At the time Jon Zellner was in charge of XM. I sent him emails about the change and he even gave me his number to discuss it(I give him that...cool move). He tried to say no one wanted the new stuff. I pointed out that the MySpace page with all 2,000+ fans hated the move. He said that wasn't a large enough sample. My points were you don't take feedback from Martha Stewart show and say everyone likes what you are doing. A real focus group would reach out to the fans of whatever channel and base decisions that way. A few months later he went on to run.....Clear Channel!
While I don't think 80's rock would be massive again, without new music being played it doesn't even get a fair chance. And it's just not 80's rock. Bands like Alice in Chains who were played on my station didn't play crap off there last record and it was real good! Let it play!