What I meant was that there is not a limited number of slots for platinum-selling singers to occupy. Madame A’s sales shouldn’t have much of an effect on Madame B’s if both are similarly great.
It’s a bit fuzzier, sure, but listener attention is not an unbounded resource. Neither are radio play, space on movie and TV soundtracks, slots on Pandora playlists, and so forth. If you become a popular musician, your work’s going to be funging against something, and most of that something is probably going to be other musicians’ work.
(The rest probably comes out of people’s attention budgets more generally, which isn’t as narrowly competitive but is no less finite.)
The market for professional basketball viewership (and therefore for players) isn’t fixed either, but someone making it to the NBA is much more likely crowding someone else out than expanding the pie.
What I meant was that there is not a limited number of slots for platinum-selling singers to occupy. Madame A’s sales shouldn’t have much of an effect on Madame B’s if both are similarly great.
It’s a bit fuzzier, sure, but listener attention is not an unbounded resource. Neither are radio play, space on movie and TV soundtracks, slots on Pandora playlists, and so forth. If you become a popular musician, your work’s going to be funging against something, and most of that something is probably going to be other musicians’ work.
(The rest probably comes out of people’s attention budgets more generally, which isn’t as narrowly competitive but is no less finite.)
The market for professional basketball viewership (and therefore for players) isn’t fixed either, but someone making it to the NBA is much more likely crowding someone else out than expanding the pie.