The big flip in publishing industry
This blog post by Clay Shirky, dated sometime in 2003, still holds true. It talks about the big flip that has happened in the publishing industry and how the effects are different in writing and music.
Firstly, digitization provided a landscape where both the amateurs and professionals can participate and compete in the same ground.
However, in the case of music, even though digitization has provided us amateur production and distribution, the finding and publicizing aspects of new music are still controlled by professionals a.k.a ‘gatekeepers'.
In other domains such as writing, the case is quite the opposite, and that’s because the gap between amateurs and professionals is not as wide and evident as that in music. The difference could also, be because of the lack of proper attribution systems in music. In the case of writing, we can always credit the sources by inserting a hyperlink or by listing out the references whereas, in music, it's difficult to articulate the sources that have fed a piece of work.
That said, applying the tools of filtering and publicizing that have been both accessible and useful in other domains could change the musical landscape.