To me, we're in a difficult position because the only way you have to quantify the value of an artwork (music in this case) is the number of streams it has.
Call me a mad man but it is not rare for me to hate most streamed music and to prefer <none> streamed music.
Yet I seriously doubt I am "musically dumb".
What I find instead is that advertisment, reputation, exposure, a good label, radio streams will get you a long way to become a <most streamed> artist.
And no, that's not "an excuse" to not try and become skilled... What sense does it make to say "Dua Lippa is better skilled than J.S.Bach because she has more streams" (or the contrary) or "AC/DC is better skilled than Alan Vega because they sold more disks" (or the contrary).
> If I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill
Okay, that's pretty sure.
Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
> Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
This is where I think we really disagree. If I want to make music people like, I’m pretty sure piano lessons would help me. Theory. Rhythm. Learning to sing. Then I need to practice! Making a smash hit isn’t predictable, but it’s not random either. Luck is a necessary but not sufficient quality. As the saying goes, most overnight successes are 20 years in the making. Watch the early stuff from Louis CK. From Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It’s not as good. They got better over time.
You can learn to write better. To be more charismatic. To connect better to an audience. You’re not in control of whether or not an iOS app is successful. But you can’t make it at all if you don’t know how to code. And if you’re bad at design it probably won’t make it. It’s not simply a coincidence that some blog posts get read and others are ignored. Ask anyone successful. By honestly any metric of success. Practice, skill and hard work won’t guarantee anyone cares about your craft. But if you don’t try? Don’t listen to your audience and improve? Good luck.
What I said is the banal : no matter how you're skilled, there's no guarantee of success, and in the small window of opportunity that is "becoming successful", there are (maybe normally distributed) skilled and non skilled people.
Not sure about "most overnight successes are 20 years in the making"; if I want to be perfectly rationnal, I recognize that this sentence is often false (but don't have the data to analyze this in depth, I would love to be able to check this though).
I don't want to offend you by any mean, but we have a tendency to pick up some examples and to hallucinate something from that few examples (which is a natural and quasi-reasonable thing to do when you have a sufficient large dataset); here you tell me about Louis CK, and while it can be true that they did better over time, I am pretty sure we can find counterexemples of this, no ? I imagine that's not a rare thing to meet people that prefer early-xxxx more than later-xxxx.
> Ask anyone successful.
I decided to erase what I meant to answer here (maybe it's time to move on haha).
Well, I think I understood you position, I'm glad we took the time to talk. The internet is full of these opportunities and I enjoy that from time to time, even if thinking in a language I master less than my main one is always tiresome and somewhat "violent" (I feel dumber in English ?). (Wow, it's late in Australia !)
> [spotify streams]
To me, we're in a difficult position because the only way you have to quantify the value of an artwork (music in this case) is the number of streams it has.
Call me a mad man but it is not rare for me to hate most streamed music and to prefer <none> streamed music.
Yet I seriously doubt I am "musically dumb".
What I find instead is that advertisment, reputation, exposure, a good label, radio streams will get you a long way to become a <most streamed> artist.
And no, that's not "an excuse" to not try and become skilled... What sense does it make to say "Dua Lippa is better skilled than J.S.Bach because she has more streams" (or the contrary) or "AC/DC is better skilled than Alan Vega because they sold more disks" (or the contrary).
> If I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill
Okay, that's pretty sure.
Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".