I definitely agree that the process of creating music is clearly collaborative, even for solo artists (since even they will have engineers, producers, and so forth being involved in almost any serious effort). My point was actually relatively narrow, and probably could have been better stated.
Let's start with this question: how much music is created by artists who post all of the intermediate work in a publicly-accessible repository, which may be downloaded, mixed at will, with folks being able to replace even the most minute portions with their own creations?
In other words, how many artists are posting out their pro-tools projects for all to download and manipulate to their heart's content?
In reality while most real music is created as part of a collaboration, that collaboration is not "open" in the same sense that people usually mean by "open source". Rather, the musicians collaborate in relative privacy, and post out their finished (or at the very least, near-finished) products for distribution in some way.
That is precisely the same manner in which most software is actually written ... hence the parallel that I was drawing between music and software creation.
I agree that nearly all software is also the product of collaboration (just as in music) ... my main point is that the process of content creation and content distribution (whatever the content) are not necessarily the same, and need not be joined at the hip.
Furthermore, some of the coolest innovation is occurring in the distribution models.
Perhaps stated this way ...
I definitely agree that the process of creating music is clearly collaborative, even for solo artists (since even they will have engineers, producers, and so forth being involved in almost any serious effort). My point was actually relatively narrow, and probably could have been better stated.
Let's start with this question: how much music is created by artists who post all of the intermediate work in a publicly-accessible repository, which may be downloaded, mixed at will, with folks being able to replace even the most minute portions with their own creations?
In other words, how many artists are posting out their pro-tools projects for all to download and manipulate to their heart's content?
In reality while most real music is created as part of a collaboration, that collaboration is not "open" in the same sense that people usually mean by "open source". Rather, the musicians collaborate in relative privacy, and post out their finished (or at the very least, near-finished) products for distribution in some way.
That is precisely the same manner in which most software is actually written ... hence the parallel that I was drawing between music and software creation.
I agree that nearly all software is also the product of collaboration (just as in music) ... my main point is that the process of content creation and content distribution (whatever the content) are not necessarily the same, and need not be joined at the hip.
Furthermore, some of the coolest innovation is occurring in the distribution models.