> I feel like the art world has a very weird “winner take all” mentality. I agree strongly with this. I'm lucky enough to have a good job in software and I en

> I feel like the art world has a very weird “winner take all” mentality. I agree strongly with this. I'm lucky enough to have a good job in software and I enjoy it enough to keep me happy, but I've also had serious art hobbies in the past. I spent many years studying photography but never felt like I got to the point where I could impact somebody's life with it. I occasionally took portraits that people liked, but most of my time was spent doing landscapes. Everyone is so oversaturated with photographs and because of the internet it's basically impossible as a hobbyist to make your work stand out. I started studying music in Dec 2019, which happened to be kind serendipitous because I had something to work on at home in the pandemic (there are only so many ways you can arrange eggs or glasses on your window sill to practice still life photography). It struck me that with music, the barrier to have an impact on someone is much lower than with photography. With photography the cost of reproduction is essentially so low that people who are interested in it can see hundreds or thousands of photos through instagram in a day, and there's not a strong concept of the "original" piece. With music, the live performance aspect of music is impossible to reproduce, so it's much more valuable to people, and even simple songs with simple melodies can have a strong effect (I made my grandmother cry by singing "Georgian Song" by Bulat Okudzhava over Zoom, I had never made anyone cry through art before). Kind of off topic but this is something I've been thinking about a lot.