[mbesto]

> Likewise, music has been around forever, but the chances of someone like Lorde, a 16 year old from New Zealand, seeing such success was much less likely before the Internet democratized music for listeners and creators alike.

You know, I see this argument a lot and I'm not buying it. To paraphrase Nate Silver in "The Signal and the Noise": just because the internet provides an exponential amount of information to the public doesn't mean everyone is smarter, because with every increase in total information there is an increase in bad information. The solution is basically better curation. Curation, in today's world, is still run by individuals and people in positions of power. Music, just like information, has seen an explosion in data points since the advent of the internet. All of this becomes democratized until it doesn't. In other words - these markets go from non-democratized (the CD world), to democratized (YouTube), and the back again (Spotify/Rdio). Cheaper access to art creation only means the market is more saturation. The signal to noise ratio (i.e. chance) stays the same, it just means a lot more noise exists.