the bottleneck of music productivity is in capturing attention
Yeah. I think the same applies to capitalism in general; these days it is relatively simply to produce many things, the problem is that thousand competitors can do the same thing, so the key is to convince the customer to buy your product instead of their mostly identical products.
Now I am not saying that good songs are identical, but they are in some sense fungible. Like, if you have a favorite song, it is easy to imagine a parallel universe where it doesn’t exist, and something else is your favorite song, and you are probably not any less happy in that universe.
As a random example, there is a CD series “Super Eurobeat” that contains 250 CDs. Assuming about 12 songs per CD, that’s about 3000 songs. It would take me more than a year to only listen to each of them once (assuming that realistically I can’t spend the entire day listening to music, I also have other things to do). These songs are already selected as the “best of” within given genre, sometimes just one best song from a music group that has produced many. And that’s just one genre, not even the most popular one. So from my perspective, the music is already well beyond scarcity; the problem is discovering the pieces that you might like. (The recommendation algorithms I have tried in the past have failed me. They mostly recommended “things that many people like” and “other songs from the same sings”. What I would like to see instead is an algorithm that can somehow figure out my music taste, and then give me songs, possibly obscure, that score very high.)
Yeah. I think the same applies to capitalism in general; these days it is relatively simply to produce many things, the problem is that thousand competitors can do the same thing, so the key is to convince the customer to buy your product instead of their mostly identical products.
Now I am not saying that good songs are identical, but they are in some sense fungible. Like, if you have a favorite song, it is easy to imagine a parallel universe where it doesn’t exist, and something else is your favorite song, and you are probably not any less happy in that universe.
As a random example, there is a CD series “Super Eurobeat” that contains 250 CDs. Assuming about 12 songs per CD, that’s about 3000 songs. It would take me more than a year to only listen to each of them once (assuming that realistically I can’t spend the entire day listening to music, I also have other things to do). These songs are already selected as the “best of” within given genre, sometimes just one best song from a music group that has produced many. And that’s just one genre, not even the most popular one. So from my perspective, the music is already well beyond scarcity; the problem is discovering the pieces that you might like. (The recommendation algorithms I have tried in the past have failed me. They mostly recommended “things that many people like” and “other songs from the same sings”. What I would like to see instead is an algorithm that can somehow figure out my music taste, and then give me songs, possibly obscure, that score very high.)