[I_Am_Nous]

Another fun thing to consider is older orchestral music as the "gold standard" for what music as theory intended. If an orchestra had the same amount of bass modern music does, it would have to be very heavily overpopulated by low brass instruments to the detriment of the rest of the instrumental ranges. Instead, each instrument is a "sound" which can be used to craft a greater musical phrase. A good example of this is a pipe organ, which has stops to add/remove particular sounds, ranges, and timbres depending on what kind of music you are playing.

Compared to modern music where the instrument isn't limited by the sounds it can physically make (due to digital production) as well as the things they make each instrument do, as you said much of modern music is carried by a beat rather than a melody, so a vocalist might be the only discernible melody. Back to a pipe organ, it would be really difficult to play a modern song on the pipe organ as a result because the structure is so different that it's hard to really compare. However, the pipe organ was a marvel in that it allowed a player to basically BE the entire orchestra if needed.

[fuzzfactor]

The pipe organ was about the only way to get that much bass volume for more decades than anything else.