> musicians are paid in dopamine
That's a good point, never thought of it that way. As a developer, it's satisfying to get better at your craft and to get small dopamine boosts from elegantly written solutions, but it's not like the rollercoaster of being in front of a bajillion people and sweating bullets and nailing your part, especially when playing in a band and melting away into something bigger than you. You can only get so much transcendence from writing login flow #65 and getting your integration tests to pass.
To be fair, as a startup founded you also don't exactly feel these incredible peaks of dopamine, but there's a longer sense of satisfaction, confidence and ownership of being a big part of something successful that puts food on the table for a bunch of people and solves pain points for even more people.
The way I see it, and I'd be curious to hear what you think, is that trying to get big the hard and old way in music (aka make a "stale" genre album, release album, hope you go viral) is kind of like starting yet another pizza shop in the middle of new york city. You're one of many, you likely don't have anything so revolutionary to suddenly crush your competition. You're very much of a commodity. Seems to me that you'd be much better off being at the beginning of a new fashion or trend in music genres, or using a new music or distribution technology (e.g. drum machines & synths, or maybe streaming your music on Twitch, or maybe TikTok) that's suddenly getting people's attention. Like with a startup, you'd be better off taking advantage of a landscape shift of sorts rather than making photo sharing app #57365 in 2020. Still won't guarantee success, but at least will improve it.