3 ms·

Are we trying to maximise the number of people creating good art, or the number of people making a living out of art? It's not the same thing.

• tunesmith 12y ago
  That's really the heart of it. Everything has moved so fast that I don't think we understand the first principles of the system. For a while I believed that all the new music production tools out there meant that the market is flooded with crappy music released by hobbyists giving it away for free. The system affects of that sort of thing is that the listeners are bombarded, they shut down, they don't have the opportunity to reliably discover "good" music, and that therefore people writing "good" music fall through the cracks, don't earn money, eventually stop writing, and culture is worse off. But... I'm coming around to the view that the market is pretty much flooded now with "good" music. I'm being hand-wavy, defining it as merely music that deserves to exist alongside other "good" music. If that's true, then it's a different model. Great for the consumer, they can probably subsist on a healthy music diet received for free. There the only path through for a musician is to try and invite fans into the "family" and hope fans will pay a premium for that. But still, you're going to have artists that write good music fall through the cracks and stop writing - it's just that in those cases, culture isn't necessarily worse off.