Might have been interesting to ever find out if this was true.
What happened instead was that Spotify led the pricing change by taking capital, cheating policy, and producing a consumption avenue that cut the price by orders of magnitude.
And meanwhile:
> cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education
The gains in education are fractional. The library or a neighborhood piano teacher were good enough resource wise. YouTube eliminates the trip (and the funny thing is that we're iffy on even rewarding those people proportionally), but isn't a new opportunity.
And even for materials that are better in the way that 3Blue1Brown is for math... just like you're going to have to sit down and spend a lot of time actually doing problems rather than just watching the videos if you have any hope of really getting it, the constraint when it comes to producing music is still sitting down and putting in the time, not only on the specific problem/work in front of you but in the background to do it elegantly.
DAWs are great and can make up for some margin of missing virtuosity, but you have to put in the time practicing using them too -- they become their own instrument.
The constraint on making music has always been time. And what gets you more time to do something? Either having another source of wealth, or getting economically rewarded for doing that thing.
Spotify and the damage it's done the market absolutely matters. Just because music is getting through the damage doesn't mean there wasn't some lost, and not just quantity, level that could have been leveraged to through the magic of compounding focus. Anybody who's read Graham's "maker schedule/manager scheduler" should already know this.
What even was the music market though? I think it was a spot where record labels could get rich off of music while musicians still had to pay their way with live shows and merch.
Why do I care if spotify's investors have replace the record label investors?
Even before the digital/internet sea change, this didn't capture the whole music industry. There were artists who made good money off their recordings either because they DIYd it, or found better labels, or negotiated better deals. None of those paths has ever been easy but before recording revenue got kneecapped it was more available.
But let's say for the sake of argument that's how it worked before the internet. If so, why did we let that level of disruption just replace one set of bad guys with another?
What we should have had instead was what we were on track to have: multiple-scale digital recording retail, Apple to Bandcamp to individual artist site to local indie collective as point of sale. Charge whatever artist and buyer choose and can clear a transaction at, they keep 70-90%. True streaming, some with a format, some algorithmically customized for both audio wallpaper and music discovery... but in every case not user-programmed because that's how you justify the difference between the ridiculous fractional cent payouts and recordings.
That's the world we could have tomorrow if the policy was there.
More likely, everybody's too used to a decade of having the privilege of an unlimited basically free recording buffet that Spotify used to cannibalize the industry and we won't do it no matter how it erodes the economics of creation. But we could.
What happened instead was that Spotify led the pricing change by taking capital, cheating policy, and producing a consumption avenue that cut the price by orders of magnitude.
And meanwhile:
> cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education
The gains in education are fractional. The library or a neighborhood piano teacher were good enough resource wise. YouTube eliminates the trip (and the funny thing is that we're iffy on even rewarding those people proportionally), but isn't a new opportunity.
And even for materials that are better in the way that 3Blue1Brown is for math... just like you're going to have to sit down and spend a lot of time actually doing problems rather than just watching the videos if you have any hope of really getting it, the constraint when it comes to producing music is still sitting down and putting in the time, not only on the specific problem/work in front of you but in the background to do it elegantly.
DAWs are great and can make up for some margin of missing virtuosity, but you have to put in the time practicing using them too -- they become their own instrument.
The constraint on making music has always been time. And what gets you more time to do something? Either having another source of wealth, or getting economically rewarded for doing that thing.
Spotify and the damage it's done the market absolutely matters. Just because music is getting through the damage doesn't mean there wasn't some lost, and not just quantity, level that could have been leveraged to through the magic of compounding focus. Anybody who's read Graham's "maker schedule/manager scheduler" should already know this.