| >people calling themselves producers The music industry has just as big a headache with imposter syndrome, the Flynn factor, and the Peter principle, as any other industry. The issue is that the music industry is extremely exploitative, while being undeniably competitive. You don't get coders going to the extremes that members do, for their art. (Not sure if that is a good or bad thing, personally.) >producers and artists making content that isn’t of the highest quality, but at the end of the day they are creating. Setting an unreasonable bar of skill is not the way forward. Its not skill. Its sell-ability. It doesn't matter if you threw lemons at a piezo and called it done, if someone is willing to pay to listen to it - because it interests them - then you've got a hit. The ability to sell music is a very, very difficult thing to attain. Music is immediately free upon creation. We, of course, have imposed a great deal of arbitrary limits on its production and reproduction and broadcast and distribution over the years - but the fact we still have musicians out there, mind-blowingly great ones in fact, who will never get discovered in their lifetimes is a clue: music is language. It therefore cannot and should not, ever, be limited by government - or its adherents - in ways which prevent the use of this language. |
But you won't, because the argument always comes to down to "Stuff I want should be free because I want it. Stuff that profits me personally should have legal and moral protections unless I personally have the luxury of choosing otherwise."
That aside - it's skill too. Of a specific kind. Producers have - actually have always had - two jobs. One is the admin side of delivering the project on time and on budget - which is not as easy as it sounds when band members may be drunk, high, unreliable, on the verge of a personal or professional breakdown, or at war with each other.
The other is having the taste and instinct to hit the market just where it wants to be hit.
Taste and instinct are incredibly nebulous and hard to define, but music buyers know them when they hear them. They're the difference between a record that sounds polished and a record that somehow has a life of its own.
With respect to Albini, having an EE degree has absolutely no relevance to this. If anything it will get in the way, because EE degrees teach you nothing about taste and musicality.
Nor - unfortunately - does talent in the abstract. Some musicians are just too talented for the mainstream. In a saner culture we'd subsidise them - somehow - without relying on the middle-of-the-bell-curve markets to do something they're fundamentally unable to do.