Should we really be incentivizing making music as a career? And besides, I don't think the bulk of music is being created by people being compensated for it.
Somewhere out there, there exists an alternate universe where musicians ponder nonchalantly whether people should be compensated for software. "Can't they just sell software logo t-shirts?"
There's a ton of people giving away very useful software and all the files and tools to easily read and modify it. There's a handful of musicians giving away music too, but I don't know of many giving away the files and tools to read and modify it.
As much as people may speak of art reflecting its creator, once it gets into the outside world, it becomes an interaction with everyone it contacts. There are a million new perspectives formed, and plenty that could be done to extend the work.
I could imagine taking software principles and applying them to art in many ways:
* Bugfixes-- from simple grammar flaws, to finishing dangled story threads, why aren't we patching and re-releasing novels?
* Technical improvements-- I could imagine, for example, a speaker manufacturer remixing songs so they sounded better on their hardware.
* Customization -- if you've made an attractive image or song, and it hasn't been repurposed to sell Diet Pepsi, you haven't really arrived.
The limit to these visions is that they run headlong both into the literal principles of copyright law, and the philosophy that art is somehow sacred as-is, rather than being a baseline for better and better things. Shorter copyrights and mandatory licensing can make it happen.
> Bugfixes-- from simple grammar flaws, to finishing dangled story threads, why aren't we patching and re-releasing novels?
This is pretty similar to what’s happened with Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. He’s repeatedly reworked it, tweaking the production and verses and in one case adding a whole new song.
> Customization -- if you've made an attractive image or song, and it hasn't been repurposed to sell Diet Pepsi, you haven't really arrived.
https://youtu.be/zxyTk3ligAc – a band playing a very close copy of their hit song Winchester Cathedral as a coke ad.
"He" being the operative word. Third parties aren't doing their own custom distributions. This becomes a big deal if you can't convince the original creator that something needs fixed.
If you've got a big enough vision that you lock horns with Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel, you fork it and release anyway. If you have a different vision than Kanye West for the album, good luck getting your version through the courts.
The importance of music and the importance of software is worlds apart. Not to mention there's enough music already made to cover everyone's need. Software is nowhere near that.
Most of today's software is a rehash of crap we already had. It's just the dumb clients render HTML instead of cursor positions and ansi colors now. And the smart clients are smaller.
That is a frightening thing to read. Just because you don't appreciate music doesn't mean you can dismiss out of hand its cultural value. I would rather live in a world without software and computers than one without music, not even close
Are you saying software is unimportant or music is unimportant?
A choice between the two, like choosing to be blind or deaf, I'd choose music, I'd choose blindness.
Music is much more fundamental to the human condition than, <laugh out loud>... software <more laughing>
Gather round the keyboard family, let's code together, you do the functions, I'll write main!
(This is intentionally harshly written, in response to the obvious hyperbole of this "Not to mention there's enough music already made to cover everyone's need" - whatever that is).
I'm aware it's all subjective, but I'll still write this:
Music is life, Software is lifestyle.
moetech, find some music that elicits a response from
a part of your lizard brain you didn't know existed, that makes you cry with connection. That's just the beginning of the journey.
>Should we really be incentivizing making music as a career?
Of course not. There is an enormous glut of cultural works, and people's quality of life would not be meaningfully harmed if all commercial production stopped. See:
> Should we really be incentivizing making music as a career?
Instrument practice, sound engineering are a crazy amount of work in order to get to a professional level. It's so bizarre to hear people say things like that, they have 0 consideration for the amount of effort put into the former, just because they can download 1 millions tracks on the internet in one click...
There are probably a hundred times more professional-level guitarists than professional guitarists. It’s a ton of work, but it’s a ton of work that a lot of people already put in just for fun.
Professional production is very hard, but it’s also kind of a moving target. A lot of production is trying to hit trends set by other producers so that your music sounds professional itself. It’s largely competitive rather than artistically significant, and there’s some great production that doesn’t sound professional but still works.
Yes, we should. If you want things done well, you want people to be able to make a living doing them. I'd love to see any sources on your claims regarding to music creation - certainly, a huge portion of quality artwork is the result of people being paid for it/creating with the expection that they'll be able to sell it. This has been true for centuries.