A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

Even if human beings cannot hear higher frequencies directly, they can hear the beats produced when higher frequencies sound at the same time as lower, directly audible ones. This has sometimes been exploited for musical purposes and I do wonder if this plays some role in some listeners’ feeling that low-bitrate encoding or speaker playback lacks oomph.

Yet that might be a blip. Some of my friends who used to be passionate concertgoers, now say there’s no reason to pay for a concert, deal with getting to the venue, etc. when bands are uploading full-length concerts in fine video and audio to YouTube. Also, since musical tastes have fragmented enormously due to the wider supply, people are less likely to share favourite bands with friends, and so you might not have anyone to go to concerts with you. Concerts used to have an attraction as a social outing, but if you’d have to attend alone, what’s the point?

I'm not sure what you mean by "studio-quality analog". If you literally mean playback from professional studio gear, what's the relevance? What consumers could buy was records.

And records are temperamental. For decent sound quality, you needed expensive turntables. Also a clean environment. If you used mass-consumer turntables, you'd destroy high frequencies. And if your records got dirty and/or scratched, there'd be noise.

Also, if you didn't have space to put the turntable and speakers in different rooms, you'd get low-frequency feedback at high volumes. Which could damage your speakers.

So I did have a decent turntable. And I only played new records once or twice. To record on reel-to-reel tape.

The closest he comes to evidence to support his thesis was the informal survey he gave his students about their perceptions about becoming a professional musician. Yet even here he fails to provide any evidence that this perception has changed relative to any of the other time periods he talks about. I don't think "professional musician" has ever been seen as a particularly valuable career path and has usually been a choice made based on love, rather than greed.

The closest he comes to an argument to explain his students' belief is not an argument about the money making potential of music given our current technology, but an argument about how there is too much competition.

Then he says this:

> And so what of the future? Since the death of Steve Jobs, Apple has not released any new platforms in the last five years. Are technological changes slowing down after 30 years of whirling change?

He ignores the two of the most important newer platforms for music: youtube and then later, spotify. Looking at the future without considering the effects of royalty paying platforms with complex recommendation engines completely misses the point about how high competition and new types of centralized discovery platforms will change the face of music. Overall, this is a poorly constructed article that reads like it is about 10 years out date, I actually scrolled up to check when it was published.

Everyone used to have a pair of gigantic bookshelf speakers, where you didn't even need a subwoofer because the woofer covered the full low end of the range. They were also shitty, but in a particular analogue way that made them "warmer" and introduced a bit of hiss (which essentially was doing a cheap antialias of the source, according to our ears.)

When was the last time you listened to a good set of speakers, outside of a movie theatre? (Good headphones don't count—they can reproduce audio with high fidelity, but they can't produce enough sound to vibrate your body from the direction they're coming from—let alone enough to make the acoustics of the room you're listening in important.)