I disagree that this is a good analogy, because you're referring to a financial barrier to entry and the GP is talking about effort, not money.

Of the genres you mention, only punk could reasonably be considered a low barrier to entry genre in that some of the biggest punk bands were famous for hardly being able to play their instruments. But it's also the single genre missing from your "Today," paragraph, indicating that yes, indeed, making good hip hop or electronica is hard even with a fantastic computer with fantastic software.

As much as I love hip hop and electronica, and as difficult as it is to make excellent music in those genres, it really is very easy to make okay music. Have you ever used FL Studio (formerly known as FruityLoops)? I remember downloading it freshman year of high school and being able to make a catchy-but-derivative hip-hop beat in minutes. That's not enough to make a hit song, but I think luck is a bigger factor than effort for a lot of underground hits.

Today, it's still how a lot of hip-hop and electronica gets made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FL_Studio#Notable_users

I'm an amateur electronic musician myself. You're not wrong, but I've found the gap between okay and good extremely hard to cross.

I think the idea that getting good at making, say, trance with, say, FL Studio is somehow easier than learning to play, say, a guitar and making good, say, metal to be ridiculous.

You can get pretty far in FL Studio with a four-to-the-floor kick-hihat-clap beat and some synths, just like you can get pretty far with four power chords on a cheap Stratocaster. It won't be good though, not really.

>As much as I love hip hop and electronica, and as difficult as it is to make excellent music in those genres, it really is very easy to make okay music.

Before finishing reading that sentence, i was ready to get upset, but the ending made it so that I perfectly agree with you.

Modern music production experience allows for a fairly easy way to make ok music, but to make good or great music, it is still just as difficult (if not even moreso, albeit not for financial reasons anymore, unlike how it used to be in the past). Basically, easy to learn at a beginner level, still difficult to master. Which is imo the optimum, because some of the best competitive games ever are set up like this. E.g., learning the rules of chess is easy, mastering chess is an extremely long path.

A bit off-tangent, but we also gotta understand that genres evolve from infancy to maturity as well. In terms of music production and composition, 80s/early 90s hip-hop was indeed fairly basic and primitive. Lyrics, similarly, were also focused mostly around the same cluster of topics related to living a tough life surrounded by crime and police brutality and such. But it was new, original, and covering bases that were not covered before in the same way.

Hence why it started gaining traction and popularity. As genre matured and evolved, music production for it got much much more complex and involved, where the ceiling for "well produced hip-hop" has went up massively. Just compare any track from Kanye West's "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" (2010) to some classic like NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" (1988). Both groundbreaking albums for their time, both still enjoyable, but there is no way to compare them in terms of music production/composition in a serious manner in 2021, as it is just night and day. The sheer complexity of MBDTF is something that set the new bar for the entire industry on its own. Lyrics on MBDTF are also touching topics that early hip-hop would never touch with a 10-foot pole back in the day.

TL;DR: fully agreed, music production became much easier to enter and produce beginner level stuff, but the ceiling went up significantly as well (which is a good thing). What was groundbreaking level production in the late 80s/early 90s will get rotten eggs thrown at you in 2021. Which makes hip-hop music production (as well as most other genres that are evolving) just as difficult of an art to master these days, if not even more difficult, but only because the bar is set much higher. The actual availability, cost of equipment, learning material access, etc. has become insanely easier.

The funny thing reading this post is that you can replace "music" with "software" and your point still holds.

Nowadays it's very easy to create OK software - with modern frameworks, tooling and templates we've enabled an army of "high performing beginners". For web software we can even deploy it with two clicks thanks to modern cloud providers.

However making something that is good or great, as ever, requires a huge amount of knowledge and experience. The kind you only get with years of practise and learning.

Synthesizers provide a wide array of different types of instrument in one housing (brass, strings, pads) in addition to effects and sequencers. This means a synthesizer can supplant what would have classically been one or many different people in a band. The same goes for drum machines.

DAWs provide most of the benefits of synthesizers and drum machines with the additional benefit of being a production studio.

You rightly point out the barrier to cost is being reduced but, in my opinion, this goes hand in hand with complexity. After all, I "could have just hired a band" to experiment, play around and bring my vision of music to life. Is putting a band in a computer for less than $300 "just a matter of reducing cost"? Encapsulating complexity is often synonymous with reducing cost.

Any tool, even ones that are cheap and/or encapsulate complexity, require training to use well. The question is whether they can be used "professionally" with a modicum of training or whether they need a lifetime. A good artist can probably be proficient enough with a synthesizer, drum machine and/or DAW in a year or two before starting to create quality work. It takes a lifetime to become a professional at the piano or violin, often requiring exponential more work for increasingly marginal gains.

You could say the same for the piano. For most musical instruments, the first months or years of study are spent just trying to get a good sound out of the thing and to be able to play all of the pitches in its range. Then keyboard instruments came along and suddenly anybody could produce a sound with zero effort at all, just by pressing a key.

However it still takes a long amount of time and a lot of practice to fully mesh your brain with the piano so that you can use it as if it was an appendage of your body. DAWs are no different, in fact a DAW is considerably harder to start using than a piano.

I’m not sure I understand the point. While the economical barrier to entry for producing music is lower with electronics and computers, it still requires time and dedication to be proficient in it. Most DAWs and synthesizers reward practice and dedication the same way a guitar or Clojure does.

These artists didn't get good overnight either. Samplers and drum machines are very much instruments that take time to learn how to use 'properly'