> If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing!
It is, but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases. More production doesn't equal to more novelty.
> but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases
Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better.
There's a story about a ceramics professor that would divide his class in two at the beginning of the semester. He would grade one group by the quality of their best piece at the end of the semester and the other group by the weight of all the pieces produced during the whole semester. The professor said that invariably, the best pieces were produced by the people in the group that was graded by the weight of their pieces. His hypothesis was that people graded by the weight would produce a lot more pieces, so in the process they would also get really good at making the pieces, whereas the people graded by their best piece would just spend too much time on their pieces trying to make them perfect and wouldn't get enough practice to actually become better at making them.
I really like this anecdote, I find it very prescriptive for life, but I don’t think it applies. Professional musicians aren’t learning how to make music like the students of the ceramics class, they are mostly fully developed artists with their own artistic style and voice. I think that constantly producing art leads an artist to become a slave to his prior work, a sort of creative fatigue. In order to foster development of an artist’s voice, they need space to get away from that style and explore other styles and forms of art.
Not a popular opinion here, but I really don’t think that coding is very comparable to pure art like music or painting, and I think that a lot of these ideas come from that place(that coding is art). Coding is art like electrical work is art—there is certainly a distinction between work crafted by a master and something muddled together by an amateur, but at the end of the day it’s functional. In these trades it’s perfectly okay to have creative fatigue as long as all the parts are good. If you have great variable names, nice modular form, terse functions, excellent descriptive comments, etc, its actually better if you have a monolithic unchanging form. Pure art, that is art meant to be consumed in the form its created, by contrast, brings with it all kinds of aesthetic values that are put by the way side in coding, and novelty and creativity are front and center.
> Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better.
That's true for engineering, but for music it only goes so far. A lot of musicians working this way will, after a while, find a formula that repeatedly sells, but loose a lot of originality in the process.
You don't necessarily have to "rush" for faster releases, you just have to think about releasing in a different way.
Think of it like a software roadmap: Is it better to wait 6 months and release a bucket of features twice a year, or to release features gradually throughout the year and measure their effectiveness? Some might say that releasing features gradually is "rushing things out", while others might say that it's the only way to ship non-broken software that people actually want to use.
That's one of the aspects of the new economy... only a very small minority of artists can literally go dark for 3-4 years to write something that will rise to the top instantly.
It is, but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases. More production doesn't equal to more novelty.