[ecshafer]

I am not sure if I buy the "de-professionalization" of the music industry. If that happened, it happened 70 years ago. beatles, beach boys, metallica. Many of the biggest bands of all time, with some of the best selling albums were literal teenagers.

[badpun]

They still needed expensive studios and technicians to produce a commercial-grade quality album. Nowadays you can try pulling it off at home by yourself.

[majormajor]

I think they have a point, though.

If you're talking about making popular music isn't the de-professionalization of the performers and (in many, many cases, especially for those groups like Metallica or The Beatles) the writers and composers more interesting than de-professionalization of the recording engineers? Which maps pretty directly to changes in tool technology, vs taste?

Though I think you could also argue the opposite, that there have long been huge amounts of "amateur" mass-popular music compared to, say, Mozart. They just didn't have recording technology to turn into Elvis or The Beatles or Dr Dre or whoever.

In games the analog is probably random card games, or Mafia, or dominos variants, vs big productions...?