But I think there's a significant difference: with music, as you play it, you are also experiencing ("consuming") it. And that's what also brings a lot of the pleasure to it.
With writing and videography, meanwhile, the act of production is usually a lot more decoupled from the experience of consumption. I happen to think that producing writing and producing video are also fun activities in their own right. But they don't fit into social life in the way that playing someone a song does.
I perform Bach terribly. But I consume Bach wonderfully when I play. I call it “Listening to the music with my hands.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfENUjqz4bs
I have experienced this with many other physical activities. To ride a twisting descent engages your brain more deeply than to look at the same road or trail. To climb a boulder engages your brain more deeply than to look at the line.
Climbers pantomime the moves before climbing just as aerobatic pilots pantomime their routine before flying. Physical motion engages the brain a certain way that simply thinking, listening, or watching does not.
The pleasure of listening to music with your hands begins when you first make a single satisfying note happen. It is not necessary to be able to play what you would like to hear.
I'm not sure it's enough to keep me going by itself (honestly, I still like to think someone else may be able to enjoy it, eventually, even if this is probably unrealistic). But it's definitely a factor.
Normally enjoyment of the art making process for amateurs is just that, enjoyment of the process. If I want to enjoy literature, I’ll read the work of professional writers. If I want to enjoy the task of writing, I’ll write myself.
For most people, art making as a hobby is occasional, simply by the time & resource limits of regular jobs, family obligations, etc. While consuming art is much more accessible.
Some other things can be closer to a gray middle area. For me, that is cooking. I expect myself to be able to make really world class food even in my crappy apartment kitchen with limited time and a normal grocery budget. So when I can’t do that, due to time constraints generally, I won’t whip together something quick just ‘cause.. I’d rather simply transfer the grocery budget to restaurant budget and eat better made things.
Thankfully, since most of the very best food is found at cheap or medium end restaurants, and not too much at five star expensive places, this is fairly easy without changing my budget. But compromising to make a mediocre thing myself, either purely for the sake of cooking or to allegedly save money, is not interesting or useful to me.
I could imagine people feel that way about a lot of things.
The simple answer is that it completely ignores how the world works. Things don't decide to be world class. They are labeled world class after they have existed and were compared with other things that are not world class. If you decide to remove the non world class things from the ranking (because they were not worth doing) you will realize that the number of non world class things has increased.
You and only you decide if a thing is worth doing. If you want to learn Mandarin, so what? You will probably never be a best-selling or critically acclaimed author of Mandarin books. You are unlikely to be the next star in a Mandarin-singing boy-or girl-band. You will not be a TV host reading the news in Mandarin.
What of it? Does learning even a little Mandarin give you pleasure? Do it!
It’s insane to judge everything in your life by whether you are going to be in the top one tenth of one percentile. That is a recipe for constant stress an unhappiness, for forever judging yourself by impossible standards and coming up short.
I don't see what "marketization" has to do with things.
There have been plenty of "busy beavers" over the years organizing all the music recordings on various non-commercial services at a scale that surpasses most similar commercial services. If anything, "marketization" has prevented them from making these collections even bigger than they have been.
Those collections are thus better seen as a resource for people who want to play music themselves, rather than as a consumer substitute for musicianship.
(Sarcasm.)
It's never going to say "our business model requires you pay 20% more to keep listening to me", or "we're going to stop working on your favourite playback device because we changed the DRM and expect you to buy a new one."
No service-based model can match those claims.
There’s a market. Not what it once was, because what was once the recording market was born out of necessity as much as anything else.
I, like a lot of other people, am definitely interested in the ephemera. I like owning records. There’s a tangible ritual to putting a record on, and there’s really something to be said for the sound. Even dirty records with their occasional pops and scratches. It’s a visceral appreciation for the medium, to be sure. That said I also buy a lot of paper books.
There’s also something to owning a copy. I use Apple Music these days when I’m commuting or on the road and it’s great. I can hear most anything I want for the price I pay each month, but I even still buy copies of albums I really love because they’re mine. It won’t go away if Apple decides to kill the streaming service, or if I decide to unsubscribe (which will be the case at some point because the stacking up of subscriptions wears on me).
On the whole? I don’t know. I’m curious about the data, too. But who is buying music? A lot of people! There is still a lot of people who don’t just see it as a commodity.
On that last note I’m not a great trend-chaser, so I probably have a certain lens I see the whole thing through—but I’m not the only one.
The main problem with streaming off Youtube is that, unless you stick to popular songs (>100M views), it's just a matter of time before some songs in your playlists become unavailable ("video is not available in your country", or unofficial upload gets deleted). I've been using NewPipe (Android) and Ivory (iOS) to play YT videos in background, so I'm not as annoyed with that as I would've been if I had been paying for Youtube Music, but it's still a deal breaker. Meanwhile on Bandcamp, some songs I bought have been deleted since that time, but I still have them in my library and can stream them in the app (I can't share link to these, though, as it's 404 unless you're logged into an account that has these in the library). Of course I could have been downloading YT videos to my PC, and stream them via Subsonic, and I was doing exactly this for many years, but I kept having weird issues with that (and it's metadata hell).
If I were to switch to Spotify, I would have to leave my music collection behind, as the songs I have on Bandcamp are not on Spotify, and vice versa. But I don't see a reason to, as Spotify would also be more expensive option vs buying 1-2 $2 albums per month. And the money I would be paying to Spotify wouldn't even go to the artist I listen to afaik, since the only thing that matters when it comes to Spotify payouts is the total number of times your songs have been played, which is determined in a large part by what the recommendation algorithm has been recommending to hairdressers and drivers, as well as what the current mainstream trends are.
Organizing data is a problem music freaks have.
I guess the other way is to play at home, in isolation, so you don't need a license like you would need when playing for a group?
I'm a musician but I've never gotten paid for making music and don't want to be. This way, songwriting and playing music can remain something I do purely for the intrinsic joy of it. And it's not really so long ago that, if you wanted music in your house, you had to play it yourself.
I have nothing against recorded music or professional musicians, but it's interesting how much we seem to collectively forget that buying music isn't the only way to have access to it. Not everything we need has to be obtained as a commodity (still less through a monthly subscription).