This is a bad take.
As the kids say, don’t hate the player — hate the game. You waxed rhapsodic about listening to vinyl and digging into liner notes and production details. I remember that too. Listening to music in those days was an immersive experience. You looked at the art, read the cover, spent time with your friends, all empowered by music that you could relate to.
But what happened between those rose-colored days and Spotify? (FYI: other services pay more, use those.) CDs happened. The shortest-lived and most cynical music format ever devised cheapened music by making it reproducible/playable anywhere (Theodor Adorno got it). The record industry wanted us to replace all our much-loved LPs with the new shiny thing and as CD sales took off, they cut back on vinyl. Did demand drop? Of course. But did they make an effort to keep vinyl alive, maybe as some kind of audiophile format? They did not. And just as important, they took away the visual/social aspect of music listening away by shrinking the form factor of the package. They could have sold CDs in 12 inch square packages with all the artwork and preserved that part of the experience for music lovers. But the people running the industry are not music lovers: they are business people, shippers of units and seekers of bonuses.
The fact the vinyl is making a comeback tells us that music lovers are still out there, valuing the experience of physical media.
As for the arguments that music is too easy to make/too easy to listen to, let’s look at the second one first. You might as well complain about radio (remember that?). But yes, pocket sized listening devices from the walkman to the iPod and smart phone have made music accessible in ways no one could have imagined. 1000s of songs in your pocket is great. Before streaming services, we used iTunes or whatever to load our devices. Was that bad? So it’s not the accessibility but the commoditization of music that’s the issue. And the people who run Spotify have made no secret that music is just a product, like water from the tap. They just want to meter that flow, no matter the source. How do you fix it? Artists take their stuff off the streaming services that they don’t vibe with. Not all can but there are some big names who could. They have the power.
As far as music being too easy to make, I was struck by the piece of viewer mail you chose to share from someone who said they didn’t understand how to make music. You know why they believe that? Because they watch this channel and hear that message. In just this video, we’re told that it’s really hard to get a good drum sound, that amp modelers are homogenized crud, that singers don’t have to sing. That’s the message, that making music is best left to a bunch of old druids and wizards who know How To Do It. Why tell people that? I record ideas for my own amusement and I never quantize the beats. I might not be 100% in tune. Some great tracks were made with out of tune instruments and beats that were not precisely on the beat. But then I am not being managed by some industry head with a quota to fill.
As for the tragic quality of today’s music, I listen to independent music all day long when I am at home and it doesn’t sound the same from one track/one artist to the next. New original sounds without gimmicks and gatekeeping are out there, KEXP.org is one source and I’m sure there are others. When I lived in Atlanta, WRAS was a good source, might still be.
So, yeah, this is a bad take. Hating on music fans and musicians is not the way.