Yeah no, that's just a cranky old guy thought. Just today I was watching fairly average looking people promoting music on late shows. You're probably getting a very thin slice of pop music and ignoring everything else (and hell, even pop breaks that rule sometimes).
Plus, physical beauty and music are both subjective. I try to not get all "old man yells at cloud" about how music "used to be better".
Tbf, I think radio absolutely used to be better before iheart and their ilk bought fucking everything and turned every goddamn station into a hypersanitized prepackaged mix of the same 10 bloody songs over and over. Therefore, by extension, I could 100% see how someone basing their opinion on what actually gets radio play could easily arrive at the conclusion that music is worse now.
I'm very lucky to have an independent radio station in my area. It's run by a nearby college, but they let anyone take training to become a host.
They don't always play music I like (hell, they don't always even play music) but I'll deal with 30 minutes of buddhist chanting because the variety can't be beaten. Also, they have no ad breaks.
Oh man, my independent station is wild sometimes. It swaps between a lot of genres, from punk to classical. They played an Earthbound video game cover once, even. My npr station is relatively fine too.
Corpos 100% ruin radio, though, and that's been true for a long time. Stations often get incentives to pay the same songs and that's only gotten worse with time. True across all popular genres, too.