Fruit is a commodity, but there's many types of fruit. And when you drill down, there's a tons of types of apples or whatever, but they're pretty much commodities.
Some are more valuable or desirable than others, but if you want fruit and you can't get what you want, you substitute with something else.
Music has a lot more variety than fruit, and some varieties are much more valuable, but still. If you're thinking about a career in music, realistic goals are going to be in education, maybe session musician, live music at entertainment venues (theme parks, cruise ships), maybe symphony; maybe something in support of music like a sound tech at a venue, etc. Being a headlining act is a career, but not a lot of people get to do that.
> You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically.
I mean, I typically listen to a specific internet radio station and it feels like they have let their playlists stagnate, but I still listen to it. So I wouldn't say nobody does. They've been down for the last two days though, currently listening to a local radio station with similar tastes (but they're constantly adding new music to their catalog).
Dear Sirs, hold your horses. There are notable definitions and references we may lean against here :)
Commmmodity:
"In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them."[0]
Note here that the essence is not about preferences ("indifference"), but "equivalence" only (ie. "fit for purpose"):
Fungibility:
"In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of whose parts are indistinguishable from any other part" [1]
- and
"Fungibility refers only to the equivalence and indistinguishability of each unit of a commodity with other units of the same commodity, and not to the exchange of one commodity for another."
So: Both sides can be right!
Music _is_ a commodity when one item (a song) is _perceived_ so similar to another item that their value _in_the_given_context_ is _perceived_ as equal by a consumer (the case for one poster below).
If a consumer assigns equal value (not preference, value) to Song A and Song B then these two are commodities because they are _interchangeable_ in some context. Both are "fit for purpose"
On the other hand, if the consumer does not want to replace Artist A with Band B then these are not interchangeable, and as they are not interchangeable they are not commodities either (the case of another poster below).
So, the customer is always right. Ie, commodity or not is a matter of context.
An apple (or type of apple, to be specific) can be a commodity because I don't care or who which orchard made the apple, and I am completely indifferent to the apples of various orchards when I go to the supermarket.
Recorded music isn't like that, at all.
I care if the song is Fly Me To The Moon sung by Frank Sinatra or Stairway to Heaven sung by Frank Oz using the voice of Kermit the Frog.
Some products are commodities. Some aren't. The word has an actual substantive meaning.
I think there's some talking past each other going here.
I think it's useful to bisect music into commodity/non-commidty categories.
Category 1 is things like Taylor swift's music which is not a commodity.
Category 2 is the music playing on lofi hip hop radio[0] is a commodity. 28,000 people are listening to the music on that channel as I type this and and approximately zero people know or care who made that music. The specific song basically doesn't matter so long as it fits the genre and meets a quality bar. They're analogous to handmade rugs - all slightly different but not in a way the consumer cares about.
So far as I can tell, most music that gets made is treated like it's in this second category: Generic Genre X song. Producing something that manages to break out of this commodity status is deeply unusual.
In anecdotal support of this, I often go to venues to listen to "bluegrass" (category 1) in much the same way I go out to buy an apple. I want the bluegrass to be good, just as I want good tasting apples, but the particular purveyor does not really matter unless it's someone special like the Punch Brothers (category 2).
Just because they themselves have outsourced the selection of the music doesn't make it a commodity.
It's like saying Michelin-starred restaurants are a commodity.
They aren't.
Once they are on that list they might be sort of interchangeable to a specific sort of person who just wants a generic "nice" restaurant and picks one off the list when they get to a city.
But they're all unique and different in really substantive ways, and also different from non-Michelin starred restaurants.
Your example of venues that hosts bluegrass works the same way. You trust the guy who books the bluegrass bands. If they just offered a gig to every band that asked you would hate going there and they'd close soon. Have you seen genuinely bad bluegrass? You don't like it, I can assure you of that.
You're just talking about curation. And the fact that curation is even possible proves what I'm saying.
If recorded music was a commodity there would only be one playlist because you would not be able to tell one playlist from the other.
Can your car tell Exxon from Sunoco? Can you drink a glass of milk and know which dairy it came from? Of course you can't.
Curation happens all the time in commodities. Tomatoes are clearly a commodity, but blemished or misshapen tomatoes (a purely aesthetic concern) are often worth far less and may even be discarded. Much of this process is done by hand (I've done it).
Corn is a commodity too, but I buy my sweet corn exclusively from one of a few vendors growing varietals that I enjoy more than what I can get at a super market (the varietal can be sold on the futures markets).
One definition of a commodity is:
> a mass-produced unspecialized product
My claim is that most lo-fi hip hop (and other genres) really looks like it fits this definition. The songs are produced in their thousands and have differences in the same way honeycrisp apples have slightly different colors and sizes, but ultimately are interchangeable.
Any further than this feels like it's nitpicking at technical details. I cannot tell the difference between lo-fi hop hop playlist A and lo-fi hip hop playlist B because the differences in the songs are not meaningful to me.
Exactly this.
OP is needlessly beating the horse to death. I have enough graduate microecon credits under my belt to happily declare music is a commodity. You don't have to tick off every single i and t from the microecon literature to meet the standard definition of commodity. Its the intent. I have a curated playlist in the 10s of 1000s, probably way more than the average music listener. I'm listening to music pretty much all the time. Its a commodity. Its a generic song. Its something that I play in the background to block out the pain. There's a lot of pain in my life. So I listen to music to block it out & get on with work. And that's music. Whether its this album or that artiste or whatever is immaterial to me. Its just some background noise that sounds pleasant & blocks out the mental pain of work.
Recorded music just like isn't a commodity. It's not close.
In fact, if you took a spectrum of all mass consumer products and ranked them from most like a commodity to least like a commodity recorded music would probably be on the side of least like a commodity.
It's not really an argument. Recorded music is not "kind of like" a commodity. There are tens of millions of recorded songs and literally every different iteration is wildly different, people consider some of them literal core elements of what gives their life meaning while other examples of the exact same product they have a visceral and intense hatred for.
> literally every different iteration is wildly different
We have a basic disagreement on facts here. My experience of the world is that very few songs have any substantial difference from the world as 1,000 other songs. With a small number of songs having the properties you describe. They are different in the way the patterns on the skin of an apple are different. Utterly unique, but not in a way that matters to consumers.
Diamonds are, perhaps, a good analogy here. Diamonds below a certain carat size are a commodity. They're ground up by the ton and sold for use in a variety of products at a cheap price (category 1 songs). Larger diamonds are not a commodity - a 45 carat diamond might be considered a national treasure (category 2 songs).
You're not understanding how some people use music. Does the supermarket care who the artist is? Not really. Do I care who the artist is? Not really, I just need dance music to keep part of my mind occupied so I can get into the zone easier; saccharine vocals help too, no substance please.
In the case that it's only one song, I'll be a little more picky. Same thing if you have to eat the same apple every day.
I'd probably just stop listening to music at that point. Or find some work where they're still running large collated copy jobs; those copy machines make some good beats.
If I had to eat the same banana every time I chose to eat a banana I wouldn’t give a shit, at all.
In fact if you told me that my understanding of physics was wrong, and that I had in fact only eaten one banana ever in my life, which had been reconstituted and delivered to me each time, I wouldn’t have anything to say. Because I wouldn’t be able to tell if that was true.
Because bananas are all the fucking same from a practical standpoint.
Some are more valuable or desirable than others, but if you want fruit and you can't get what you want, you substitute with something else.
Music has a lot more variety than fruit, and some varieties are much more valuable, but still. If you're thinking about a career in music, realistic goals are going to be in education, maybe session musician, live music at entertainment venues (theme parks, cruise ships), maybe symphony; maybe something in support of music like a sound tech at a venue, etc. Being a headlining act is a career, but not a lot of people get to do that.
> You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically.
I mean, I typically listen to a specific internet radio station and it feels like they have let their playlists stagnate, but I still listen to it. So I wouldn't say nobody does. They've been down for the last two days though, currently listening to a local radio station with similar tastes (but they're constantly adding new music to their catalog).