Retro bands, etc.

it seems that there's been a percieved increase in "retro" or super referential artists in 00s. Though bands' influences have always been issues, it appears to me (and this could of course be just to me) that bands have been percieved/written about more reductively in the past few years; things like dance-punk are reduced to incredibly specific origins. In general, it seems like there's been a lot of band x sounds like bands y and z, etc. etc. My question is how much of this is acknowledged/intentional by the artists themselves and how much is work done by critics.