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Oh my...this is hardly "making music".This is a tutorial. Learning scales on the piano is hardly "making music" either.
>Is paint-by-numbers making art? I sure don't think so, so neither is this.
Painting by number surely is one, albeit limited, form of expression, and thus art.
And if you could re-arrange the numbers and change colors, and add your own parts (like you can here) it would be 100% art.
>What would have been way way better is a brief introduction to music keys, major and minor, then basic chords, then progressions, then melody, with each section having a few examples of each so that the person going through the article could have some understanding of how music is really made, and how musical concepts actually relate to each other.
That would be better to make e.g. a classical or jazz musician.
(I was trained when young in those things).
This is for another style of music, that could not give less fucks about those "musical concepts" (you can use some of them - and some are covered in the tutorial -, but you can do it instinctively too, or it can bypass it altogether -- great techno tracks using just one chord for example, or of indeterminate tonality, are very common), but which still enables all kinds of expression (to the point of creating works that can move listeners to tears and heightened emotional states).