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DevDesmondtoday at 5:00 PM0 repliesview on HN

Music was already worthless. Here's Deadmau5 giving advice to aspiring producers in 2012:

> You need to make a world. So you have a rollercoaster in your backyard. And it’ll be the hot thing in the neighborhood for about a week. But once everyone’s had a go… they’ll lose interest, go home n play Sega instead. What you need then, is a fuckin’ theme park… and you AND your music are the theme. People come into your theme park…..check out all this shit… buncha rides, no 2 the same, some merch here and there, special events, dolphins through hoops and all that whack shit. You want people to come to your theme park and feel like they’re a part of this world of yours.

Franz Lizst was a rockstar in 1840 because he could write and play the piano really well. But culture and technology has progressed.

A popstar today can usually sing, dance, write, produce, act. They're business people with a marketing vision and gimmicks to go with it. Polymath performers, creators, and multi-instrumentalists. Technology marches forward and the next generation of artists will be those who adapt the tools available.

We're certainly losing something culturally. Just like this guy[1], who spent 1906 lamenting that the mechanical music machine (phonograph) will ruin music, was somewhat right in his prediction that fewer and fewer people would learn instruments and sing well.

"Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? ... When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery? Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs -- without soul or expression?"

When I was a really young kid, I used to hum to myself with a buzzing sound to try and copy the early EDM sounds I grew up listening to. I went on to do electronic music production myself. (And that love of electronic music was the fuel that kept me interested in learning classical piano, jazz, music history and more, and why I still have a piano next to my desk now).

Personally, I'm excited to see what the next generation art and artists end up looking like.

[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21m-380-music-and-technology-con...