Can Ease of Creation Lead to Decrease in Quality and Value?

One of my favorite music commentators, Rick Beato, discusses this point very well in his remarks on the history of the music business and technology. He splits this into two acts, and both map very well onto what I'm also observing in other industries.

Early recording studios had singers and musicians crowd around the mouth of a large cone-shaped horn. Their sound would travel down the horn's throat, vibrating a stylist, and cutting the audio directly into a cylinder made of soft wax—ultimately capturing a live performance.

In the 1940s and 50s, Frank Sinatra stood in front of an orchestra with one microphone and sang the take.

Then came multitrack machines and punch-ins, then AutoTune in 1998, then tools like Beat Detective that snap every drum hit to the grid. The swing and the human feel is simply gone!

"Sterile, generic, quantized rock music that has no vibe at all. They're so easy to use, doesn't take any skill at all, but it doesn't take any creativity either."

And then there's AI. Beato even mentions he gets about 20 emails a day that start with something like "I wrote a song that I think can be a hit. I used AI to do it because I know nothing about making music."

He also makes a point that stuck with me: even the shortcuts depend on craft. Samples come from people who knew how to record them. AI models are trained on music made by people who knew how to make it.

The current state of streaming is similar to a kitchen tap. Turn it on... music flows down the drain, then turn it off.

In 2025, more than 100,000 new songs were added to streaming platforms every day! That's more than one song per second, for the entire year.

Now, if you are as old as I am, you probably remember the perceived value that one single track had! And that value was both financial and emotional. We mowed other people's lawns to be able to buy a 10-dollar record, then we played it over and over. Got used to it. Learned from it. That single album (which was already designed and crafted with a sequence of songs in mind) took us months to consume. We shared them with friends, read the credits on the back cover, spoke about our favorite artists when we should be paying attention in school, and many of those songs became almost supporting characters in the most special moments of our lives.

Today, all of Bach, Michael Jackson, Miles Davis, and Kendrick Lamar costs $10.99 a month, which is the price of what we used to pay for one album!

With no sweat equity put into obtaining it, music stopped being part of people's collection and part of their identity. If you can have everything for $10.99 a month, what is one song worth? People say they want more ambitious music, but in the end they "vote with their attention," and attention goes to whatever is easiest.

What struck me most is that none of this is really about talent. It's what happens to any craft when making it becomes nearly free, consuming it becomes nearly free, and the reward for doing it well disappears. Good music didn't disappear. It got buried, and the average experience of music got thinner.

I confess I had to pause and really reflect about these ideas. My mind is in conflict because we often tend to think of "democratization" as something inheritely good and unquestionable (sacrosanct).

For most of my career, the process of crafting software required some sweat. Even when I was working with dumbed-down technologies, like MUMPS and ZIM-L4G (both designed to be easy and tailored for rapid-development), the entire team was required to understand the language, the platform, the architecture, the edge cases, and the hundred small decisions that separate something that works from something that works well. That difficulty was our studio time and our tape. It slowed everyone down, and it also forced a certain level of care.

AI is removing that friction at a speed music never experienced. Today someone with no programming background can describe an app in a few sentences, "vibe code" their way through the errors, and publish it the same afternoon. App stores, game stores, plugin marketplaces, and SaaS directories are already filling up with titles that look alike, work alike, and were clearly cheap to make.

Putting music and software examples next to each other, and they line up almost one for one:

If the music story is any guide, I expect a few things to follow:

I want to be fair here: lowering the barrier is not a bad thing in itself. Plenty of people who were locked out of building software will now make genuinely useful things, just as home recording gave us artists who would never have gotten a record deal. I use these tools myself. The question isn't whether ease of creation is good or bad. It's what happens to quality and value when effort stops being part of the price.

Great music is still being made, and I know great software will still be made. But look closely at the exceptions in music today and you'll notice a pattern: they are the people who chose the hard way when the easy way was right there. The band that records live in a room looking for a 'warm-sounding' song. The drummer who refuses to be quantized. The artist who spends two years on an album instead of two days on a track. They are exceptions precisely because they go against the easy, cheap way of making things.

I think software will go the same way. When generating something becomes trivial, the scarce things become:

None of that comes from the tool. It comes from people who enjoy the process enough to keep caring about it! Similar to a 17-year-old who couldn't believe he was getting paid to have fun writing obscure config files for HP-UX servers.

So, does ease of creation lower quality and value? My honest answer is yes, overall it does. And I know this sounds horribly elitist, but I'm trying to set aside my automatic aversion to the word elitist and honestly examine whether we're losing more than we're gaining when we become too concerned about offending (or even excluding) others.

Ease of creation lowers the minimum effort needed to put something out into the world, and the average quality drops with it. Quality doesn't disappear completely, but it becomes the exception rather than the norm: diluted, harder to find, and easier to undervalue. Music didn't lose its great artists. It lost the conditions that made people notice and value them.

Software is standing at that same door right now. We can let it become an endless stream of cheap, generic titles, or we can use these new tools to spend less time on the boring parts and more time on the parts that actually matter.

I don't have a neat conclusion, and that's fine. This was never meant to be a technical article. So I'll leave you with the question my friends and I couldn't settle:

I'd genuinely like to hear what you think. You can yell at me on Twitter. And if you're one of those people who enjoys learning how things really work under the hood, remember to visit the courses page.