This is probably going to end up being a controversial opinion, but I just don't think music is worth that much anymore (fiscally speaking). Sure, there was a time when being popular meant signing a contract-- it was the only way to distribute your music on a large scale. Radio and physical copies were the only way to hear music, period. But these days with the internet and the right software practically anyone can create and distribute high quality professional sounding music. It's just not that difficult anymore, and I don't think it justifies such a steep price tag. Could there be such thing as a "music bubble"?
Give me all of the top music software in the world and I won't be able to create anything worth listening to. Your statement is kind of like saying since word processing software and electronic distribution are widely available, books really aren't worth the price tag. It's the creativity and hard work that goes into books and music that makes it worth the price--not the cost of the distribution medium.
There are two definitions of worth or value that people conflate every time a discussion like this comes up. One is "produces happiness or utility." Another is, "marginal cost to create absent government regulation." It would be easier if people would just stop using the word "value" when making either claim, but that'll never happen. So you basically have to ask what people mean each time they say something.
For me, it's obvious that songs have people-enjoy-it-value. It's simultaneously obvious that it has no marginal-cost-to-produce-value. To the extent I believe that music will become more rare if it pays less well, then, I should support some manner of government regulation to protect the industry that produces it. (And, of course, there's the unstated assumption that people will generally not pay when they don't have to, which is also open to debate both on theoretical and empirical terms. And a bunch of other unstated moral assumptions that I'm not going to go into.)
That's true, but at the same time there's more absolutely fantastic music in the world than I will ever be able to able to listen to in my lifespan. While you or I might not be able to produce it, there are probably thousands if not millions of artists out there who produce worthwhile music.
I'm not saying they're overpaid, but it is an interesting economic observation that the supply side of the market might be oversaturated relative to the demand.
Give me all of the top music software in the world and I won't be able to create anything worth listening to.
Perhaps this is a slight tangent, but are you sure about that? It seems daunting now, but that's probably because you're at the rock bottom of the learning curve. I'll bet there has been more than one brilliant musician who's looked at their sequencing software and thought "I could never write this". I don't mean to suggest that there's a Mozart inside everyone, but I don't see why we couldn't teach musical literacy as "easily" as we teach programming. Music Engineering 101?
Maybe more to the parent's point, it's also possible that it doesn't require a Mozart to make a popular song today. PSY's Gangnam Style is clever and fun but if you turn off the video and don't understand the lyrics, the music is basically sampled from 90s trance hits. You could make a similar argument for Lady Gaga. The major creativity seems to be something layered on top of the music. How notable would OK Go be without the brilliant videos? Yes yes, I love their music too - but there's a lot of great indie rock out there.
Maybe there is a supply/demand curve for music. It's an interesting perspective that I have never heard before. Also consider: Old music doesn't "expire", so as new music is created, it increases the total supply. New bands are not only competing with each other, they're competing with every band that has ever released music.
I agree that several of today's top performers are rehash 90's trance and euro dance. It honestly makes me laugh. I remember making similar music on Fruity Loops with Sonic Foundry Acid Pro as a kid. I had a midi keyboard and crappy monitors.
Creating digital music does have a learning curve...I had a rudimentary knowledge of music. I took a year of piano lessons. I could imitate some of the music I liked. The hardest part was creating something unique. I could be proud of.
Sequencing will always be fun for me. I have amassed some cool toys over the years. It is nothing more than a hobby.
I think the point is not that music software enables you specifically would be able to produce worthwhile music, but that it enables many people who are musically talented to create and distribute their work. There is, of course, an implicit assumption that there are a large number of such gifted people, but that assumption may not be as outlandish as it first appears. I had many friends from high school marching band who earned pocket money playing at weddings and such, yet every single one gave up music by the time they graduated from college.
We all know that anecdotes are not data, but the legacy music distribution model seems to be optimized for using labor efficiently a case where fixed and marginal costs are higher than they currently are. It is far from obvious that those optimizations are good ones where the cost of recording equipment has dropped by orders of magnitude and the cost of distributing a single song is so low that people will do it for free.
There's still a development. Bands that I know used to have poor 8-track analog machines like 10 years ago. Now they use a standard-issue laptop and some additional hardware that cost maybe a couple of hundred bucks to make decent-quality recordings that they burn on cds and sell or give away. Skill is still one factor, but the other limiting factor - capital has been shrinking more and more. So there's more good music out there in good quality and that diminishes the price. Now wether that's good or bad - I don't know.
There's no empirical way to measure the amount of effort or creativity that goes into something. It just seems to me like 20 dollars for a movie is more justifiable than 15 on an album, based on the _apparent_ amount of work that went towards their creation (not to mention the actual cost). In the end, I could probably make an album myself, but I couldn't create an entire movie. Why are they priced so similarly?
It's ultimately the end quality and impact of the product that make it worth (or not worth) the price.
An album is more feasible to make on one's own, but it's also much more likely to be listened to many more times. I've heard my favorite albums far more than I've watched my favorite movies. But at the same time I realize how much it costs to produce a major motion picture, so I'm okay with paying ten bucks to sit in a theater for two hours. They provide me different kinds of value.
That quality/impact has always been what gave creative works value—the scarcity of physical distribution only enforced that value, it didn't create it. A physical copy of an album nobody liked couldn't be sold for $15, even though it was no more sharable than a physical copy of an album everybody liked. The problem facing creative works with the internet is finding a way to make money off of producing high quality works when you can no longer rely on physical scarcity. But that doesn't mean there is no value there anymore: genius and talent are still scarce.
Moving to models built on services like Pandora and Spotify could turn out to be a good thing if it shifts rewards in favor of things with lasting quality, not just a "make two good hits and ten crappy songs to push a bunch of one-time album sales." But I think they're going to have to bring in a lot more revenue to be really effective at rewarding truly talented artists. But hey, radio is able to do it, and that's a "free" service too.
What I said wasn't meant to be construed as a universally applicable statement, quite the opposite. It's highly specific to the industry. Music isn't the same as software. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs [1] (which is a theory, admittedly) music is used to self-actualize, which is less important than, say, food and water (which are physiological needs). The only value to music is the value the listener places on it. It's not really necessary for everyday life.
