It's always the worst time in history
"It's never been harder" is a common lament across most commercial and creative disciplines - societal instability, saturation, market conditions, environmental factors and a whole host of other issues tend to be cited as headwinds to almost any endeavour.
Discussions of historical difficulty and friction almost inevitably devolve into tedious "in my day, all we had was a curved stick" pomposity stacked up against fantasies of a perfect past - as such, they don't seem to have a productive outcome.
Suppose we definitively prove that "kids these days are lazy" or "the old folks are out of touch"- there doesn't seem to be much collective value there? "Just work harder" isn't advice that anyone can take in a generalised sense - that type of feedback (if it's required at all) needs to come from a specific, targeted, actionable intervention from a trusted person. Equally "you need to understand how good you had it" is far too abstract to have any meaningful utility - you can't reason another person into empathy, and even if you could, what do you expect them to do with it?
The conversation has much greater practical use if we start from the premise that the distribution - rather than the magnitude - of overall ambient difficulty is the factor of most concern to us directly.
This enables us to approach the entire conversation with two specific goals:
Acknowledging and adapting to friction in the present
Understanding and learning from difficulty in the past
The past inside the present
Let's take electronic music as our case study.
25 years ago, making a professional quality slice of electronica likely required hardware synthesizers, hardware samplers, analogue outboard processing and effects units, a mixer, monitors set up in a treated room, a reliable computer of some kind, a specialist DAT recorder and access to a skilled mastering engineer with their own set of high-end processing equipment.
Technical information was hard to come by, with specific techniques handed down by engineers, distributed piecemeal in monthly magazines or (eventually) buried in online forums and mailing lists.
Beyond the final mix, the entire supply chain was out of the musician's hands in most cases due to the absolute dominance of physical media. Manufacturing, distribution, marketing, retail and licensing were all - by necessity - controlled and financed by external entities. Eventually, ecommerce and cheap consumer CD-burning technology meant that direct online "print-on-demand" sales were possible but this was labour intensive and hard to scale.
So how did musicians meet these challenges?
Embracing constraints
Technical limitations led to a great deal of creative experimentation and the creation of a whole array of genres. Techno and house music largely derived from a few select pieces of kit; hip-hop and jungle relied heavily on limited sampling of readily available pre-existing material, and so on. The lo-fi charms of some of these processes are so compelling that many current musicians either seek out ancient hardware or use plugins intended to emulate their sound.
Community efforts
Local music scenes were highly prevalent, with many underground labels establishing their own shared studios and other forms of mutual support springing up. Larger commercial concerns were often much more insulated from demand signals than grassroots creative organisations - tapping into trends was much more viable at the local level.
Culture crash
Successful independent and experimental musicians found ways - in conjunction with more entrepreneurial types - to generate cultural relevance at scale. Narrow PR channels meant more direct coverage for stunts, outrageous performances or other attention grabbing behaviour.
Today, a cheap laptop with free software and a pair of mid-range headphones is genuinely capable of getting you all the way to the finish line in many situations. Daniel Ek of Spotify recently enraged musicians by asserting that "the cost of creating content is close to zero" but in some ways, he's not too far off. Access to information is abundant - top producers regularly show off their entire process in videos and livestreams; there are countless free courses which cover everything from the basics to high-end production techniques. Finally, global distribution is virtually instantaneous: while there are certainly fees and compromises to be made, friction between the creator and the audience has now never been lower.
But as friction reduces across some aspects of the process, it increases in others - there is a counterbalancing effect.
Audiences now have relatively straightforward access to any piece of music produced in human history; an avalanche of new content arrives every day which creates discovery issues for platforms. The fickle and flawed curation systems they have implemented create an uncertain shifting landscape for music marketing, making it hard to define a space for any concerted period of time.
The superabundance of content has pushed many producers towards live performances, but genres which perform well in a live setting often don't translate quite as well to home listening or licensing, leading to some artists becoming trapped on an exhausting treadmill of touring.
Is the situation hopeless or are there ways out?
Open source
Given the flexibility and freedom of information distribution, many musicians now document their process and create content alongside their creative production - this brings in a wider audience and enables them to derive secondary benefits from their daily work.
Digital locales
The attentional bloodbath of large scale platforms has led some musicians to build hyper specific communities around their own work, with direct monetisation systems like Patreon and Bandcamp enabling them to sustain a direct relationship with fans and collaborators.
Embracing possibilities
The technical possibility space for music is now immense, with super efficient production methods enabling tracks to get turned around faster and new horizons for creative sound design. Creative limitations can now largely be self-imposed, leading to huge potential stylistic innovations.
What's the alternative?
There are countless examples of successful businesses started during adverse economic conditions - Disney, IBM, Microsoft, Hyatt and many others all got off the ground during rough times. The terrifying "Indiepocalypse" - one of gaming's many deeply embarrassing “discourse” moments - didn't prevent widespread success at any economic level you could care to name across indie development over the last decade.
Comparisons with the past are only helpful if they lead to a useful output. Pessimistic reinforcement or self-aggrandisation are both a tremendous waste of time - if you are looking to do anything, I recommend avoiding them at all costs. Instead, try to develop an accurate lens for the distribution of friction in the current moment, as well as respecting the very real difficulties faced by those who have come before you.