What happens to a music format when most of the audience has abandoned it? Oh, it’s a very common tale. Moribund genres that leap to mind include fusion, disco and folk. Each of these styles still exist, but certainly not in the same form and not with anything close to the same popularity that each once enjoyed-in the mid-1970s for fusion and disco or in the early 1960s for folk.
Part of the decline has to do with labeling. When performers release music today that would have previously fit one of these categories, disco is now called dance music and folk is usually termed alt country. Fusion, or jazz-rock fusion as it was originally known, might fall closer to techno, but of these examples, true fusion music has retreated farthest from the scene.
Ed Roth & the Radio
Further comments on smooth jazz from Tom Wilmeth