The OP video dances around some things I do think are deeply affecting music:
- The bottom has absolutely fallen out of the music industry as a whole. Music spending including live music (and god help you if you factor out Taylor Swift) is just way way down. People gripe that streamers don't pay much in the way of royalties, but the reality is the pool is just way way smaller. This is downstream of many other societal trends.
- At some level it's not really that much cheaper to make music (you can always make a boombox recording with a pawn shop guitar) but certainly the economics favor a musician working solo on a DAW rather than trying to organize a garage band; people don't want to have to pay supporting musicians or band members they think are contributing less. However, this reduces collaboration which reduces creativity and polish. The OP talks about how this has killed the studio musician and that's part of it, but it goes beyond that. People may have bought Beatles albums to hear John, but John needed Ringo's artistic input to be great, which we know because we know what John was like without Ringo. I also think this is why IMO the vast amount of innovation in the last decade or more has been in electronica / EDM, which minimally handicaps solo artists.
- Artists have made bad art forever, longer than people have made good art, but in both cases their reach was less. We think of radio and similar as curating the bad out and keeping the good, but a non-trivial part was just telling you what was good, whether it was all that great or not. This is generally obliterated. As other posters have pointed out, this has let niche music of tremendous quality gain new reach, but it also drowns you in generic dreck.
I would point out the discussion of 'copyright infringement' using someone else's music to train an AI is rather an odd concept, as all human artists also train on other (generally copyrighted) music, from childhood.
