MADE

Is there a limit to the amount of music that the public will consume? I think the answer to that is no. Take comfort in that because it also means that, theoretically, there is no limit to the number of musical acts that the public will accept. Don’t worry too much about competition.

We used to have to worry a great deal about competition in the music business because it was very real, and very severe. A large part of the reason is because it was artificially created by the powerful record labels. They created a finite pie. Today, the pie is infinitely large.

To really understand what changed all of that, you have to understand the concept of wealth. Most people confuse wealth and money. But the two aren’t the same. Money is a byproduct of wealth. It’s the best way we could come up with to move wealth around.

Wealth is simply defined as anything that people want. If you fix up an old house, you’ve created wealth. You could make money from that wealth by selling the house. Wealth can be a house, a painting, a piece of software code or a new novel. If you invented a machine that could make your meals, build your house and magically teleport you to your home every evening, you wouldn’t need money, would you? But you’d be wealthy. Conversely, having a lot of money doesn’t make you wealthy. If you had a million dollars, but were in the middle of the Sahara Desert, you wouldn’t be wealthy.

Money is just a means of transferring wealth; a way of making trade possible in a society with specializations. If I make shoes and you grow corn, and I want some of your corn, but you don’t need my shoes at the moment, money makes it possible for us to make a fair trade. I give you money for your corn, which you can use to buy whatever you need whenever you want.

The wealthiest countries in the world are the ones that allow their people the freedom to create things at will. That’s why America’s so wealthy. It is at its heart a nation of entrepreneurs and wealth creators. Most of the Western world has been that way in one form or another for the last few centuries.

Within a society, there are usually certain types of occupations within any given period in history that produce most of the wealth. Most of the great wealth in the 20th century was created by industrial craftsmen types. Men like Carnegie and Vanderbilt. Titans of industry who facilitated the development of major physical infrastructures.

Now, in the computer age, wealth creation is dominated by computer geeks. Almost everything is now based on software. The 21 century is at the speartip of an explosion of wealth created by software programmers.

The music world is also going to create new wealth. Not because many musicians are going to get rich, but because many new musicians who wouldn’t have had any opportunities to expose themselves to the public will have the opportunity to do so to larger and larger numbers of people. And the thing that’s making all of this possible is the Internet.

The major labels used to put an artificial ceiling on the amount of wealth that the music industry could create because they controlled distribution channels. Big music presided over a tremendous massacre of wealth creation through its total control of distribution. Tens of thousands of very talented music artists over the last several decades were dissuaded from composing excellent music because they were blocked from capitalizing on their wealth by record labels.

Then the Internet came roaring through. We’re seeing an explosion of new wealth creation in the music industry. The reason is simple. Anyone can now afford to make music and get the word out to the public. Before they couldn’t. Most of this new music will be of poor quality, but some of it will be very good. And there’s really no limit to the amount of good music that the public will consume. As long as the means to get it out to the public is possible, somebody will want it. Even if it’s just 500 people. So there’s really no basis for believing that the music world is or will get over-saturated with music. Some people have this existential fear that the bucket is getting full. But if that kind of thinking motivates your music career, you shouldn’t be doing music. The amount of wealth that can be created and consumed is infinite.

Whether most music artists will be able to convert all of this new wealth into money is another matter. But what matters most to society is that the Internet has demolished the ceiling for wealth creation in the music industry.

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