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I wonder if there is any artistic benefit by marrying the arts with a deeply capitalist system. Obviously as this article mentions its not great for the artist

I wonder if there is any artistic benefit by marrying the arts with a deeply capitalist system. Obviously as this article mentions its not great for the artists themselves, but perhaps the cutthroat nature of the industry makes it so that only the best of the best rise to the top, even if it means it comes from an independently wealthy musician.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bruce511 3y ago
Music is a commodity. There's already more music available to let my playlist run for years without repeats. Plus it's never been easier for folk to create, and publish, new music. With endless supply comes diminishing unit value. So, not to be brutal, but playing music is not an especially valuable thing, and so people really don't need to pay much for it. Ditto for writing books, making ceramics, pretty much anything artistic. I say this not to be a dick, but simply to point out the economics. When a million other people can do what you do, and live in the same city, then don't expect to make much of a living at it. Sure there are exceptions (hi Taylor) but that has less to do with actual music and more to do with other factors.
- CPLX 3y ago
  No it's not. A commodity would mean that people are indifferent to the music of Metallica vs Taylor Swift vs your brother in law's blues band. They aren't. So it's not a commodity. Because that's what commodity means. You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically. Playing music well in a way that is liked by millions is an unbelievably valuable thing. Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint.
  - bluefishinit 3y ago
    I think you're underestimating the role marketing plays in demand generation. It's not that Taylor Swift is "better" than the local jazz guitarist, she's just more heavily marketed. Music labels know that the mass audience doesn't appreciate musical complexity so they market simple music with attractive performers. Then the Clear Channel/Ticketmaster... machine takes over and handles the promotion and distribution. I'm actually a big fan of pop music, but that doesn't mean that non-pop is financially unsuccessful because it's "bad", it's just not put into the marketing machine because it very well may be too good.
    - CPLX 3y ago
      I'm probably not underestimating the role marketing plays in music. I'm the former head of digital at a major music agency, and I handled campaigns for multiple album of the year Grammy winners and household name artists, almost certainly including music and artists you consider important in your life. It's not really about marketing. Everyone thinks that and they're wrong. You learn this instantly when you are actually in the business and see all the artists and projects that get the exact same amount of marketing effort as the massive hits and go literally fucking nowhere. It's like home run batting, even the best in the world at picking and promoting music are lucky to have like a 10-20% success rate. Audiences have a mind of their own, they like what they like. The problem people have with understanding this is usually that they don't like the same thing that mass audiences like, and they consider what they do like higher quality. So in their minds the masses are being duped, marketed to. Which is true to a point, they are being marketed to. And having resources and labels and monopolies behind you can definitely expose you to more people. But it's not enough, at all, if people don't respond to it. And conversely, if you have no resources whatsoever it's way harder, but it's not impossible at all and stuff that really has wide appeal most of the time really does bubble up and catch attention pretty quickly.
      - bluefishinit 3y ago
        > It's like home run batting, even the best in the world at picking and promoting music are lucky to have like a 10-20% success rate. Mass market success is basically a crap shoot and doesn't really reflect the quality of the musician. You said: > Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint. And that's not true at all, being a virtuoso is pretty much worthless from an economic standpoint. It's pointless to try to equate skill to economic success because in pop art they don't have anything to do with each other. It's all about marketing and distribution. Not to say that the studio musicians that make the pop music aren't virtuosos, but they're definitely playing simplified songs.
  - tel 3y ago
    With respect to your experience cited in your other comment, a lot of my music experience time is a continuous stream of random tracks on Apple's "Made for You" feature. I'm not particularly partial to what comes up. There's obviously a degree of quality that I'm expecting in order to keep the experience smooth and a set of genre and musical conventions I'm expecting. I wouldn't say that's exactly commodified, no, but I definitely feel like my engagement with the difference between Taylor Swift and some other well-produced halfway reasonable pop artist is pretty minimal. At least in that act of listening. I used to care a lot more about this. I used to keep up with my favorite artists and look forward to their releases excitedly. Now, I feel everything is such a continuous stream of mild-novelty that I'm less attuned to these differences. So in that sense, I think I agree with the grandparent in that something feels interchangeable and indifferent about music. I don't want to pay a ton for it, even as someone who used to love buying albums. Or, at least, the times when I engage with music in that way seem fewer and further apart. Music seems to serve two purposes. The majority of my listening is unintentional, background listening. Much more rarely am I more engaged in the experience. Only in those latter times do I feel all that attuned to a difference in quality.
    - CPLX 3y ago
      Sure. Now, instead of using an algorithm of music selected by a mass market service that is playing you an endless stream of songs that are proven to have a large audience, try listening to the raw feed of uploaded music to major services. Like the literal feed coming in that is just a firehose of every major label, all the indie releases uploaded via Distrokid or similar, and so on. You'd find it instantly unlistenable. Nobody wants that because it sucks. Most music, even music people have taken very seriously, has almost no appeal to anyone at all.
      - tel 3y ago
        So there's a filtering/refinement process. That doesn't immediately seem so unlike other commodities. I buy refined gasoline, for instance.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Fruit is a commodity, but there's many types of fruit. And when you drill down, there's a tons of types of apples or whatever, but they're pretty much commodities. Some are more valuable or desirable than others, but if you want fruit and you can't get what you want, you substitute with something else. Music has a lot more variety than fruit, and some varieties are much more valuable, but still. If you're thinking about a career in music, realistic goals are going to be in education, maybe session musician, live music at entertainment venues (theme parks, cruise ships), maybe symphony; maybe something in support of music like a sound tech at a venue, etc. Being a headlining act is a career, but not a lot of people get to do that. > You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically. I mean, I typically listen to a specific internet radio station and it feels like they have let their playlists stagnate, but I still listen to it. So I wouldn't say nobody does. They've been down for the last two days though, currently listening to a local radio station with similar tastes (but they're constantly adding new music to their catalog).
    - CPLX 3y ago
      You're not understanding what commodities are. An apple (or type of apple, to be specific) can be a commodity because I don't care or who which orchard made the apple, and I am completely indifferent to the apples of various orchards when I go to the supermarket. Recorded music isn't like that, at all. I care if the song is Fly Me To The Moon sung by Frank Sinatra or Stairway to Heaven sung by Frank Oz using the voice of Kermit the Frog. Some products are commodities. Some aren't. The word has an actual substantive meaning.
      - toast0 3y ago
        > You're not understanding what commodities are. You're not understanding how some people use music. Does the supermarket care who the artist is? Not really. Do I care who the artist is? Not really, I just need dance music to keep part of my mind occupied so I can get into the zone easier; saccharine vocals help too, no substance please.
  - solarmist 3y ago
    It's a commodity in the same way as fashion is. Each piece is unique, and people become attached, but something equivalent would take its place in its absence. I don't know a term for that other than commodity, but sure, it's not the strict definition in economics. Please suggest an alternative word if you know it.
    - CPLX 3y ago
      > It's a commodity in the same way as fashion is. Which is to say, it's not. That's the point. There's no fashion choices in West Texas Crude or Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil. Those are commodities. Each producer of the product produces an indistinguishable result from each other producer. You are producer indifferent. Most of the time you don't even have a way of knowing who produced the commodity you're consuming. Fashion, music, cars, hotels, laptops, and many other things aren't that. You care if it's Chanel, BMW, Hilton, Apple, or Taylor Swift, versus H&M, Honda, Motel 6, HP, or Metallica.
      - solarmist 3y ago
        I'm not asking what it's not. I'm asking what it is. If an option were removed, something (not a random substitution, but eventually a substitute would be found) else would take its place and fulfill the same function even though it isn't the same it's close enough to fulfill the purpose.
        CPLX 3y ago
        That’s called a substitute good. Every good has a substitute good. That doesn’t make it a commodity, words have meanings. The distinction is important. The original thread here posited that music wasn’t a lucrative field because it’s an interchangeable commodity. That’s just flat wrong. It’s the opposite. It’s not lucrative because it’s very highly differentiated and the popularity follows a power law distribution and you’re probably not in the top echelon. But you could be. Which is why people try so hard. That’s an entirely different analysis.
        3y ago
- x3iv130f 3y ago
  The exceptions are such because they are able to sell themselves as a "lifestyle brand" with a musical act associated. Something many musicians don't understand is that music is not primarily artistic nor technical but cultural.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  And TayTay's where she's at because her father supported her in it.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Parental support is useful, but not sufficient. If parental support was sufficient a lot of people would be s lot richer now. Taylor is where she is because of an extraordinary amount of hard work (not sufficient by itself) an extraordinary amount of writing skill (not sufficient by itself), supporting parents who moved etc to maximise those skills (not suffcient by itself), an understanding of her audience (not sufficient by itself), some element of luck (persistence) and so on. Its not one thing that makes you stand out in music, its everything.
- JSavageOne 3y ago
  > but playing music is not an especially valuable thing Sure if your definition of value is "income generated".
  - orbz 3y ago
    Money is pretty much an abstract way to represent value though.
    - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
      Notably, it's a very imperfect abstraction.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    In the context of this thread, and the context of the actual article, yes "valuable" in the economic sense. Of course there are other benefits to playing music (it's fun!) But the post was about doing it for money.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  What about this does not apply to software, or any other highly paid profession?
  - npteljes 3y ago
    Software is very quickly outdated, and the software world is also expanding. So you need a lot of people writing new software. I don't know how much security there is in the field, in our lifetime, probably a lot. But I can also imagine a world where the CPU doesn't get much faster anymore, and the churn of paradigms and frameworks slow down, and in that world, software lives longer and so you'll not need as many, or as many highly paid, software people.
    - bruce511 3y ago
      History is full of examples. Think cars and planes. Invention, followed by massive innovation, rapid obsolence, followed by industry consolidation, and eventually stagnation. Between ww1 and ww2 military planes had a lifespan of a few years, tops. The Spitfire was conceived in the 30s, obsolete before the end of the 40s. [1] Today military planes have much longer lives, B52, F15, F16, A10 are all still in active service since the 70s or earlier. I was lucky enough to have a career in the golden age of computing. The next generation will oversee the consolidation, and in 40 years time work in hardware, and software will be commodity jobs for a small handful of multinationals. [1] prototype 1936, production 1938, 24 major upgrades in 9 years production ends 1947, retired by the RAF in 1954.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Some highly paid professions are likely safe. Think Doctor. Basicically they're a commodity [1] but we kinda like having them around and (cruicially) their work doesn't scale. Frankly, at some level, software is already a commodity. Some markets have matured and it's increasingly unlikely you'll make a living there[2]. I needed a compass app on my phone the other day, there are a million to choose from, they're all free, and there's no way to differentiate one app that shows North from another. We are currently in the phase of new platforms, and that helps. I've worked on DOS, Windows, Linux, Web and Mobile. Each platform asks for the existing work to be redone. Once platforms settle down, once the library of work is big enough, and feature-complete enough [3] then the software development market will become very unvaluable. Itll exist, but it won't be a high-flying job. [1] I use the term commodity here in the sense that it's interchangeable in use , not that they're identical. Cars are a commodity because they all perform their function (transport) while differentiating on more-or-less irrelevant details (Cup holders). Sure a 2023 car is "better" in a million ways, but a 2012 car does the transport job perfectly well. There was once 50 car manufacturers in a single town in the UK. Today there are a handful globally. It takes a new platform (Tesla) or a new market (China) to make anything new in this space. [2] outside the odd viral game, which has its 15 minutes of popularity, you can't make money with a soley mobile app. You can make money with the app as an interface to a big backend system, but its the system making money not the app. [3] in some cases it's already there. How many times are upgrades basically a collection of visual updates coupled with features nobody uses? We fiddle around the edges but most languages are interchangeable. Good luck making money in developer tools these days - novelty is not enough. Yes tool x is better than everything else, but so is tool y, z and a. Sure everyone has their favorite editor, but the reason we can't decide on vi or emacs Is because functionally they both do the editing job just fine.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Yeah it’s supply and demand. There’s a lot more people that would love to be concert pianists than there are concert pianist jobs. I feel like these conversations often ignore the middle class of musicians that make a decent living gigging, touring, doing studio work, publishing with small labels, etc., but are not making huge money pumping out top 40 hits and filling stadiums.
- wude935 3y ago
  Yes, but your favorite type of music may not be my favorite type of music. “Good enough” music might be a commodity, and with the commodification of “good enough” music, the more niche genres will start to disappear.
westernpopular 3y ago
This is just "capitalism breeds innovation" with extra steps, and the answer remains No.
npteljes 3y ago
>perhaps the cutthroat nature of the industry makes it so that only the best of the best rise to the top I think that's proven false, by the existence of Marketing as a field. Deep pockets achieve that it's not the "best X" that reaches places, but whatever they are pushing is reaching places. Not 100% the case, but still, music production is so an industry, and it's arguable whether this is good for the artists - or the public, for that matter. TL;DR the deeper the capitalism, the more exclusively the capital prevails

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bruce511 3y ago

Music is a commodity. There's already more music available to let my playlist run for years without repeats. Plus it's never been easier for folk to create, and publish, new music. With endless supply comes diminishing unit value. So, not to be brutal, but playing music is not an especially valuable thing, and so people really don't need to pay much for it. Ditto for writing books, making ceramics, pretty much anything artistic. I say this not to be a dick, but simply to point out the economics. When a million other people can do what you do, and live in the same city, then don't expect to make much of a living at it. Sure there are exceptions (hi Taylor) but that has less to do with actual music and more to do with other factors.

CPLX 3y ago
No it's not. A commodity would mean that people are indifferent to the music of Metallica vs Taylor Swift vs your brother in law's blues band. They aren't. So it's not a commodity. Because that's what commodity means. You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically. Playing music well in a way that is liked by millions is an unbelievably valuable thing. Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint.
- bluefishinit 3y ago
  I think you're underestimating the role marketing plays in demand generation. It's not that Taylor Swift is "better" than the local jazz guitarist, she's just more heavily marketed. Music labels know that the mass audience doesn't appreciate musical complexity so they market simple music with attractive performers. Then the Clear Channel/Ticketmaster... machine takes over and handles the promotion and distribution. I'm actually a big fan of pop music, but that doesn't mean that non-pop is financially unsuccessful because it's "bad", it's just not put into the marketing machine because it very well may be too good.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    I'm probably not underestimating the role marketing plays in music. I'm the former head of digital at a major music agency, and I handled campaigns for multiple album of the year Grammy winners and household name artists, almost certainly including music and artists you consider important in your life. It's not really about marketing. Everyone thinks that and they're wrong. You learn this instantly when you are actually in the business and see all the artists and projects that get the exact same amount of marketing effort as the massive hits and go literally fucking nowhere. It's like home run batting, even the best in the world at picking and promoting music are lucky to have like a 10-20% success rate. Audiences have a mind of their own, they like what they like. The problem people have with understanding this is usually that they don't like the same thing that mass audiences like, and they consider what they do like higher quality. So in their minds the masses are being duped, marketed to. Which is true to a point, they are being marketed to. And having resources and labels and monopolies behind you can definitely expose you to more people. But it's not enough, at all, if people don't respond to it. And conversely, if you have no resources whatsoever it's way harder, but it's not impossible at all and stuff that really has wide appeal most of the time really does bubble up and catch attention pretty quickly.
    - bluefishinit 3y ago
      > It's like home run batting, even the best in the world at picking and promoting music are lucky to have like a 10-20% success rate. Mass market success is basically a crap shoot and doesn't really reflect the quality of the musician. You said: > Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint. And that's not true at all, being a virtuoso is pretty much worthless from an economic standpoint. It's pointless to try to equate skill to economic success because in pop art they don't have anything to do with each other. It's all about marketing and distribution. Not to say that the studio musicians that make the pop music aren't virtuosos, but they're definitely playing simplified songs.
- tel 3y ago
  With respect to your experience cited in your other comment, a lot of my music experience time is a continuous stream of random tracks on Apple's "Made for You" feature. I'm not particularly partial to what comes up. There's obviously a degree of quality that I'm expecting in order to keep the experience smooth and a set of genre and musical conventions I'm expecting. I wouldn't say that's exactly commodified, no, but I definitely feel like my engagement with the difference between Taylor Swift and some other well-produced halfway reasonable pop artist is pretty minimal. At least in that act of listening. I used to care a lot more about this. I used to keep up with my favorite artists and look forward to their releases excitedly. Now, I feel everything is such a continuous stream of mild-novelty that I'm less attuned to these differences. So in that sense, I think I agree with the grandparent in that something feels interchangeable and indifferent about music. I don't want to pay a ton for it, even as someone who used to love buying albums. Or, at least, the times when I engage with music in that way seem fewer and further apart. Music seems to serve two purposes. The majority of my listening is unintentional, background listening. Much more rarely am I more engaged in the experience. Only in those latter times do I feel all that attuned to a difference in quality.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    Sure. Now, instead of using an algorithm of music selected by a mass market service that is playing you an endless stream of songs that are proven to have a large audience, try listening to the raw feed of uploaded music to major services. Like the literal feed coming in that is just a firehose of every major label, all the indie releases uploaded via Distrokid or similar, and so on. You'd find it instantly unlistenable. Nobody wants that because it sucks. Most music, even music people have taken very seriously, has almost no appeal to anyone at all.
    - tel 3y ago
      So there's a filtering/refinement process. That doesn't immediately seem so unlike other commodities. I buy refined gasoline, for instance.
- toast0 3y ago
  Fruit is a commodity, but there's many types of fruit. And when you drill down, there's a tons of types of apples or whatever, but they're pretty much commodities. Some are more valuable or desirable than others, but if you want fruit and you can't get what you want, you substitute with something else. Music has a lot more variety than fruit, and some varieties are much more valuable, but still. If you're thinking about a career in music, realistic goals are going to be in education, maybe session musician, live music at entertainment venues (theme parks, cruise ships), maybe symphony; maybe something in support of music like a sound tech at a venue, etc. Being a headlining act is a career, but not a lot of people get to do that. > You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically. I mean, I typically listen to a specific internet radio station and it feels like they have let their playlists stagnate, but I still listen to it. So I wouldn't say nobody does. They've been down for the last two days though, currently listening to a local radio station with similar tastes (but they're constantly adding new music to their catalog).
  - CPLX 3y ago
    You're not understanding what commodities are. An apple (or type of apple, to be specific) can be a commodity because I don't care or who which orchard made the apple, and I am completely indifferent to the apples of various orchards when I go to the supermarket. Recorded music isn't like that, at all. I care if the song is Fly Me To The Moon sung by Frank Sinatra or Stairway to Heaven sung by Frank Oz using the voice of Kermit the Frog. Some products are commodities. Some aren't. The word has an actual substantive meaning.
    - toast0 3y ago
      > You're not understanding what commodities are. You're not understanding how some people use music. Does the supermarket care who the artist is? Not really. Do I care who the artist is? Not really, I just need dance music to keep part of my mind occupied so I can get into the zone easier; saccharine vocals help too, no substance please.
- solarmist 3y ago
  It's a commodity in the same way as fashion is. Each piece is unique, and people become attached, but something equivalent would take its place in its absence. I don't know a term for that other than commodity, but sure, it's not the strict definition in economics. Please suggest an alternative word if you know it.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    > It's a commodity in the same way as fashion is. Which is to say, it's not. That's the point. There's no fashion choices in West Texas Crude or Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil. Those are commodities. Each producer of the product produces an indistinguishable result from each other producer. You are producer indifferent. Most of the time you don't even have a way of knowing who produced the commodity you're consuming. Fashion, music, cars, hotels, laptops, and many other things aren't that. You care if it's Chanel, BMW, Hilton, Apple, or Taylor Swift, versus H&M, Honda, Motel 6, HP, or Metallica.
    - solarmist 3y ago
      I'm not asking what it's not. I'm asking what it is. If an option were removed, something (not a random substitution, but eventually a substitute would be found) else would take its place and fulfill the same function even though it isn't the same it's close enough to fulfill the purpose.
      - CPLX 3y ago
        That’s called a substitute good. Every good has a substitute good. That doesn’t make it a commodity, words have meanings. The distinction is important. The original thread here posited that music wasn’t a lucrative field because it’s an interchangeable commodity. That’s just flat wrong. It’s the opposite. It’s not lucrative because it’s very highly differentiated and the popularity follows a power law distribution and you’re probably not in the top echelon. But you could be. Which is why people try so hard. That’s an entirely different analysis.
        3y ago
x3iv130f 3y ago
The exceptions are such because they are able to sell themselves as a "lifestyle brand" with a musical act associated. Something many musicians don't understand is that music is not primarily artistic nor technical but cultural.
dehrmann 3y ago
And TayTay's where she's at because her father supported her in it.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Parental support is useful, but not sufficient. If parental support was sufficient a lot of people would be s lot richer now. Taylor is where she is because of an extraordinary amount of hard work (not sufficient by itself) an extraordinary amount of writing skill (not sufficient by itself), supporting parents who moved etc to maximise those skills (not suffcient by itself), an understanding of her audience (not sufficient by itself), some element of luck (persistence) and so on. Its not one thing that makes you stand out in music, its everything.
JSavageOne 3y ago
> but playing music is not an especially valuable thing Sure if your definition of value is "income generated".
- orbz 3y ago
  Money is pretty much an abstract way to represent value though.
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    Notably, it's a very imperfect abstraction.
- bruce511 3y ago
  In the context of this thread, and the context of the actual article, yes "valuable" in the economic sense. Of course there are other benefits to playing music (it's fun!) But the post was about doing it for money.
saagarjha 3y ago
What about this does not apply to software, or any other highly paid profession?
- npteljes 3y ago
  Software is very quickly outdated, and the software world is also expanding. So you need a lot of people writing new software. I don't know how much security there is in the field, in our lifetime, probably a lot. But I can also imagine a world where the CPU doesn't get much faster anymore, and the churn of paradigms and frameworks slow down, and in that world, software lives longer and so you'll not need as many, or as many highly paid, software people.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    History is full of examples. Think cars and planes. Invention, followed by massive innovation, rapid obsolence, followed by industry consolidation, and eventually stagnation. Between ww1 and ww2 military planes had a lifespan of a few years, tops. The Spitfire was conceived in the 30s, obsolete before the end of the 40s. [1] Today military planes have much longer lives, B52, F15, F16, A10 are all still in active service since the 70s or earlier. I was lucky enough to have a career in the golden age of computing. The next generation will oversee the consolidation, and in 40 years time work in hardware, and software will be commodity jobs for a small handful of multinationals. [1] prototype 1936, production 1938, 24 major upgrades in 9 years production ends 1947, retired by the RAF in 1954.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Some highly paid professions are likely safe. Think Doctor. Basicically they're a commodity [1] but we kinda like having them around and (cruicially) their work doesn't scale. Frankly, at some level, software is already a commodity. Some markets have matured and it's increasingly unlikely you'll make a living there[2]. I needed a compass app on my phone the other day, there are a million to choose from, they're all free, and there's no way to differentiate one app that shows North from another. We are currently in the phase of new platforms, and that helps. I've worked on DOS, Windows, Linux, Web and Mobile. Each platform asks for the existing work to be redone. Once platforms settle down, once the library of work is big enough, and feature-complete enough [3] then the software development market will become very unvaluable. Itll exist, but it won't be a high-flying job. [1] I use the term commodity here in the sense that it's interchangeable in use , not that they're identical. Cars are a commodity because they all perform their function (transport) while differentiating on more-or-less irrelevant details (Cup holders). Sure a 2023 car is "better" in a million ways, but a 2012 car does the transport job perfectly well. There was once 50 car manufacturers in a single town in the UK. Today there are a handful globally. It takes a new platform (Tesla) or a new market (China) to make anything new in this space. [2] outside the odd viral game, which has its 15 minutes of popularity, you can't make money with a soley mobile app. You can make money with the app as an interface to a big backend system, but its the system making money not the app. [3] in some cases it's already there. How many times are upgrades basically a collection of visual updates coupled with features nobody uses? We fiddle around the edges but most languages are interchangeable. Good luck making money in developer tools these days - novelty is not enough. Yes tool x is better than everything else, but so is tool y, z and a. Sure everyone has their favorite editor, but the reason we can't decide on vi or emacs Is because functionally they both do the editing job just fine.
tnecniv 3y ago
Yeah it’s supply and demand. There’s a lot more people that would love to be concert pianists than there are concert pianist jobs. I feel like these conversations often ignore the middle class of musicians that make a decent living gigging, touring, doing studio work, publishing with small labels, etc., but are not making huge money pumping out top 40 hits and filling stadiums.
wude935 3y ago
Yes, but your favorite type of music may not be my favorite type of music. “Good enough” music might be a commodity, and with the commodification of “good enough” music, the more niche genres will start to disappear.

westernpopular 3y ago

This is just "capitalism breeds innovation" with extra steps, and the answer remains No.

npteljes 3y ago

>perhaps the cutthroat nature of the industry makes it so that only the best of the best rise to the top I think that's proven false, by the existence of Marketing as a field. Deep pockets achieve that it's not the "best X" that reaches places, but whatever they are pushing is reaching places. Not 100% the case, but still, music production is so an industry, and it's arguable whether this is good for the artists - or the public, for that matter. TL;DR the deeper the capitalism, the more exclusively the capital prevails