>Actually, now that we're digital, the economies of scale of music are similar to software, in that they are massive
Is this the case? It seems that there's the fundamental limitation of 10 musicians not being able to record a song in 1/10th of the time. Certainly there are SOME economies of scale, but it seems a little incredible that music would be as "factory producible" as something like a bookshelf or a car.
> The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few.
This seems incongruous with the rest of what you are saying. Yes clearly there is an entrepreneurial component of music, and absolutely eg. SoundCloud and BandCamp is enabling independent artists in new and important ways. That doesn't change the fact that massive financial institutions are rent-seeking the bejeezus out of the bulk of the industry in a way that (to me) would appear to hurt competition.
With the wide adoption of WebGL, it's a good time to get involved in graphics. Furthermore, GPUs are taking over esp. with the advent of machine learning (nvidia stock grew ~3x, amd ~5x last year). The stuff nvidia has been recently doing is kinda crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if in 15 years, instead of AWS, we are using geforce cloud or smth, just because nvidia will have an easier time building a cloud offering than amazon will have building a gpu.
These are some good resources to get started with graphics/games
# WebGL Programming Guide: Interactive 3D Graphics Programming with WebGL
Historically, C++ has definitely been THE language for doing graphics but if you are starting these these, you would have to have really compelling reasons to start with C++ and not JavaScript and WebGL. And that's coming from someone who actually likes C++ and used to write it professionally.
This is more of college textbook if you'd prefer that but the WebGL one is more accessible and less dry.
# Physically Based Rendering & Real-Time Rendering
These discuss some state of the art techniques in computer graphics. I'm not going to claim to have really read them but from what I've seen they are very solid.
Is this the case? It seems that there's the fundamental limitation of 10 musicians not being able to record a song in 1/10th of the time. Certainly there are SOME economies of scale, but it seems a little incredible that music would be as "factory producible" as something like a bookshelf or a car.
> The advent of physical media and distribution control enabled them to form these cartels, and extract rents to enable luxurious "rockstar" lifestyles for a select few.
This seems incongruous with the rest of what you are saying. Yes clearly there is an entrepreneurial component of music, and absolutely eg. SoundCloud and BandCamp is enabling independent artists in new and important ways. That doesn't change the fact that massive financial institutions are rent-seeking the bejeezus out of the bulk of the industry in a way that (to me) would appear to hurt competition.