Is this bad? Music isn’t dying, local music especially is flourishing with the advent of new technologies that make music-making far more accessible to more people than ever before. As said in the article “the venues with live music are overrun with demos of musicians willing to play for peanuts.” How can this explosion of people making music be anything but beneficial for the development of music in society?

The problem then, is not a lack of musical diversity or local acts, but rather more restricted access to the enviable caste of “professional musician.” However, I can only see the withering of such a class as a net positive for music going forward

Musicians want to make money, of course. Who wouldn’t want to be able to support himself by doing something he enjoys? But by expressing this sentiment one is implicitly playing into the corporate, capital-driven structure of music (though obviously on a smaller scale) where the nascent artist has already lost by placing himself at the bottom of a pyramid where averages assure us, regardless of talent or merit, he will not succeed.

This “success,” of course, is determined purely by a metric intrinsic to the system, where one’s goal is to become the very obstacle (the established, money-making musician) that had previously stood in one’s way.

I have undoubtedly been hasty in my analysis, using ambiguous and unhelpful words like “good” and “bad” to describe the effects of an exceedingly complicated evolution that is occurring right now in the musical landscape. But, one phrase that has yet to steer me wrong seems appropriate here: ‘more is more’. The collapse of the music industry and the ‘professional musician’ would be a drastic restructuring of the dynamics which have governed the relationship between ‘local’ and ‘national’ music, inevitably privileging the former over the latter, resulting in an huge upswing in creativity and diversity, the birth of a new organic musicianship which will flourish and bloom in the felled bloated corpse of its former oppressor.