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How Amateurs Destroyed the Professional Music Business
David Gerard writes "Here in the future, musicians and record companies complain they can't make a living any more. The problem isn't piracy — it's competition. There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and terrible for musicians. There are bands who would have trouble playing a police siren in tune, who download a cracked copy of Cubase — you know how much musicians pirate their software, VSTs and sample packs, right? — and tap in every note. There are people like me who do this. A two-hundred-quid laptop with LMMS and I suddenly have better studio equipment than I could have hired for $100/hour thirty years ago. You can do better with a proper engineer in a proper studio, but you don’t have to. And whenever quality competes with convenience, convenience wins every time. You can protest that your music is a finely-prepared steak cooked by sheer genius, and be quite correct in this, and you have trouble paying for your kitchen, your restaurant, your cow."
Beta took two tapes to hold a movie, while VHS took one, this was significant. The quality difference when hooked up to old TV sets via RF was negligible. If I recall, Beta machines were more expensive as well. At the time, VHS was a better choice for most people.
The parent to your comment was talking about album sales, whereas you're talking about single sales. That album sales are down and single track sales are up has been known for a while now, and all it really indicatesis that people are consuming music differently now: in single track chunks.
The public determined what "quality" meant. Kind of like how the PS2 lives on after a decade of service or how DVDs are still king (for now). Good enough quality plus convenience are what matter.
If "professional" musicians can't get people to purchase their music and people instead purchase some "inferior" music isn't that "inferior" music actually superior because it's what people want? It might not be produced in an expensive lab/studio but it's what people want...who cares what label the creators have?