[mehwoot]

Amateur music is quickly filling in that gap, especially on the electronic front (not just EDM, there is a huge variety of music composed digitally that sounds nothing like your standard rave music).

No, you are completely wrong. I can't talk about genres I don't know about but for the electronic music I listen to there is a painfully obvious difference between amateur and professional stuff. To the point where I think it is harming the genre. The top artists earn almost nothing from sales of their music, but command large fees for playing 1-2 hours sets every weekend.

There is a real dearth of new talent because people getting into it just don't have the sound engineering experience to make their music sound good enough for people to enjoy. What happens is the big labels find producers would could have some talent, take them on board and teach them how to make the music and have the experienced engineers tidy up their work until it sounds good. What this has resulted in is the two major labels absolutely dominating the scene with a large majority of the big names signed to them and absolutely dominating the share of music listened to. One of the labels also owns the major online store that sells music in this genre.

And yet, they still make next to nothing from sales. This is why ghost producing is so widespread in electronic music- the only money to be made is in live performances. To get big there, you need good productions to get a name for yourself. So what do you do if you're only interested in making music but not performing? You make the music, put it out with someone else's name, they do the performance and bring in the $$ and you split it (or whatever your agreement is).

Now, competition might be more prevalent in other genres- but I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that in genres without significant competition, there is still no money to be made in sales. People listen to the top artists like crazy, they just don't pay for the music because why wouldn't you just download it all for free?

[pzuraq]

That's true for a lot of music, I will admit there is a huge amount of crap out there. But at the same time there is a growing amount of quality. Consider pretty much anything on the Pretty Lights Music net label, or the many, many others that put out quality music for free. This is a trend, it is consistent, there will be more of it in the future where there was none of it in the past, and that is what people seem to miss. People want to listen to good music, but they are less and less willing to pay for it. Even if piracy were not an issue, this would still be the case.