That’s not what the article is talking about. When I was growing up (mid 90’s) and earlier, ANY commercial success was selling out. Playing your guitar at the local cafe? Awesome. Signing your first album deal? You’re selling out, man.
It was a weird remembrance of the punk movement, and maybe counterculture before it, where basically any capitalist interaction was working with The Man and considered selling out.
Your cafe/album part makes it sound like a clear binary, but it was an enormous gradient spanning the entirety of pop culture and just about everybody seemed to rely on it for orientation. From the most pretentius "we would never" that was all top obviously more about getting an offer than about the claimed selling out, all the way to stadium rockers struggling to retain whatever the term "authenticity" meant to them or their audience.
The 90ies started with R.E.M. freshly signed on Warner instead of I.R.S. and ended with an absurd DAG of labels and sublabels and sub-sub-sub-labels (again, with the whole range from true grassroots independence to being part of one of the global media giants ten indirections deep), shortly before that entire monstrosity was put down by the onslaught of Napster, iTMS and so on.
That's probably true but people were reminded that they were losing agency on their creation to businessmen. The creation was losing a bit of its soul. Nowadays most 'creations' are designed to make money from the very beginning.
Very few people still create something for the sake of creating something great. If you are aware of some of them please share !
Not "art" per se, but SpaceX has a little cottage industry of followers who make terrific content, and successfully monetize it, while staying true to the ideals of producing the content for enthusiasts' sake. Marcus House, Tim Dodd, etc. Of course they cover other content too, and had established products before pivoting heavily towards SpaceX, but they certainly keep the sense of community.
It was a weird remembrance of the punk movement, and maybe counterculture before it, where basically any capitalist interaction was working with The Man and considered selling out.