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Comment by mc3301 | Hacker News Reader

Tale as old as time... today's "bakers" are nothing like the bakers of 100 years ago. With their digital temperature gauges, global recipe and ingredient sourcing, cold storage, and more advanced food science.

Today's musicians have far greater access to lessons, recording equipment, inspirational material than 100 years ago.

Mountain biking (80s single speed with no gears, suspension, etc.) versus modern e-bikes with radial tires and hydraulic brakes.

Who cares? Value your own experience as you do. The less we all think about prestige, the more it will go away.

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I actually disagree completely. Mastering the piano is different from mastering digital synthesis no doubt, but there are also distinctive commonalities that make and mark a master in both. A disproportionate investment of time or the effortlessness with which one can generate sounds imagined or perceived, as though the machine were a part of one’s own body, are attributes shared by both. Certainly someone could spend thousands of hours mastering different digital synthesis techniques, and I don’t think that’s easier than mastering the piano. There’s a fundamental competitive aspect to things like music that keeps mastery difficult to attain. If it weren’t difficult then it wouldn’t be as valuable and scarce. Once things become common and accessible, they quickly become boring and new genres are invented.

People thought "canned music" (aka prerecorded music) would be the death of music, and art in general

>The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...

It kinda was the death of music - reasonably-skilled musicians used to make money performing live, and now they can't. The market got eaten up by recordings of really good artists, who, ironically, treat music more as industry than art.

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