You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected

On top of that, music was not a commodity back then. Live performances literally made a living for many of them as these performances were the only source of music. (And a church needs this music for every mass, for instance.)

Now music is abundant, recordings are cheap / free, and the best performance is easily available in a recorded form. Live performances are still a thing and still feed many of the music creators. Royalties, too. But you better be a superstar for that to bring enough. (Liszt and Mozart were superstars, in a sense.)

Wait until a Dall-E equivalent for music emerges though.

Is champagne higher-quality than coca-cola? Of course it is, but no serious person argues that the world ought to prefer champagne to coke. Quality is a combination of a bundle of--cough--qualities, not all of which are accessible to everyone, nor are they necessarily desirable to everyone.

One example of the accessibility aspect is that many mediums have a natural progression. The music educator Jerry Coker provides a simple model: He wrote that the enjoyment of music requires--amongst other things--a balance between familiarity and novelty.

In his model, when we listen to music our brain is constantly "playing along," basically predicting what the next note or whatever will be. When it's always right, we can grow bored of it because it lacks novelty. When it's always wrong, we grow frustrated with it because it lacks familiarity. Somewhere in between is the right combination of "yes, I know this, but whoa, that was cool!"

This model explains one kind of progression: We begin in a new genre with things that are relatively simple to digest and which are repetitive. As we gain familiarity with simple and repetitive music, we seek out more complex music that has provides a little more novelty, such as unusual chord voicings or progressions.

Of course, we eventually grow overly familiar with that, so we seek out even more novelty, and at some point, we find ourselves enjoying music that our friends who haven't taken our journey find repellantly random.

Is that music of higher quality? Yes? It's something that people with more experience with music prefer, which is one way to define "quality."

Is there something wrong with the simpler music that is more accessible to those who haven't taken the same journey? No.

Is there something wrong with the universe that most people do not enjoy the "higher quality" music? Also no.

One of the new genres that really impresses me, is 3D art. The art form is getting quite mature, and often requires as much work as any Dutch Master oil painting.

One of my favorite 3D renderings, is Worth Enough, by radoxist[0]. Nowadays, I'm sure that there are works that beat it, but it was quite amazing, when he posted it.

[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...