> Now everyone can make great sounding music and distribute it globally for free. The result is a gazillion genre musicians. Entirely agreed, and a point I oft

> Now everyone can make great sounding music and distribute it globally for free. The result is a gazillion genre musicians. Entirely agreed, and a point I often find myself making in conversations about this stuff. However: > I used to play in genre bands 20 years ago. No one made a living doing it. There are a lot of rose colored glasses being worn here. I've never been a fan of spectacularly popular music. I used to have a collection of about 3000 vinyl albums, and of that, about 2/3 were by musicians I would characterize as "genre". Of that, I would guesstimate at least half of them used to make some sort of living from their recorded music (based on a quick mental survey of the musicians and what I knew/know about their lives). This is (was) particularly true of jazz, improvised music, electronic music. > The current situation is much, much better: everyone has the opportunity to make music, and listeners have more music available than they could have ever imagined, and it's all essentially free. I mostly agree with this, with the proviso that I'm not sure we really understand what the long term impact will be of "even less people than before can making a living from selling recordings of their music".