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01 / 05
Musical Abundance

Blog Post | Innovation

Musical Abundance

For the time it took our grandparents to earn the money to buy one song in 1955, we get 19,750 songs today.

Summary: Thanks to technological innovations and economic growth, the time and money required to access music has plummeted over the decades. This article explores how personal music abundance has increased since 1955 and what it means for human creativity and well-being.


Thomas Edison developed the original phonograph record in 1877. The first playable records were made from paper pressed between two pieces of tin foil.

On March 15, 1949, RCA Victor became the first label to roll out 45 rpm vinyl records. They were smaller and held less music than the popular 78s and were printed in different colors. Rolling Stone notes, “Teenagers of the Fifties took to the portable, less-expensive format; one ad at the time priced the records at 65 cents each. One of rock’s most cataclysmic early hits, Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ sold 3 million singles in 1955.”

Unskilled workers in 1955 were earning around 97 cents an hour. This puts the time price of a song at 40 minutes of work.

Apple launched the iTunes Store on April 28, 2003, and sold songs for 99 cents. By this time, unskilled wages had increased to $9.25 an hour. The time price of a song had dropped 84 percent to 6.42 minutes of work. Listeners in 2003 got six songs for the price of one in 1955.

Apple Music launched on June 30, 2015. Today a student can get access to 90 million songs for $5.99 a month. Unskilled workers are earning around $14.53 an hour, so the time price is around 25 minutes of work. Users stream as well as download albums and tracks to devices for offline playback. If a typical song runs three to four minutes, you can play 12,342 songs per month. The time price per song is around one-eighth of a second of work. 

For the time it took our grandparents to earn the money to buy one song in 1955, we get 19,750 songs today. Since 1955, personal music abundance has been growing around 15.9 percent a year, doubling in abundance every 4.5 years.

All of the products we enjoy today are the culmination of billions and billions of little bits of knowledge that humans discover and then share with the rest of us in free markets. Create a song and share it with the planet. We can lift ourselves up and make life better for one another.

Do we still have problems? Of course we do. And we will always face challenges. But look at what we have accomplished in the last 200 years. This is what happens when people are free to solve one another’s problems.

You can learn more about these economic facts and ideas in our new book, Superabundanceavailable on Amazon.

Classic FM | Leisure

Robot Performs the Cello with a Symphony Orchestra

“In an age of increasingly sophisticated AI and the fear that one day humans will be made obsolete, the classical music world has remained relatively unfazed, with the prospect of a robotic symphony orchestra the stuff of a sci-fi movie.

Now though, that illusion has all changed, as a robot made its debut playing the cello with a symphony orchestra.

In a mesmerising piece written by Swedish-born contemporary classical composer and producer Jacob Mühlrad, the lines between acoustic and electronic music are skilfully blurred in this performance which took place in the Malmö Live Concert Hall.”

From Classic FM.

MIT Technology Review | Communications

People Are Using Google Study Software to Make AI Podcasts

“‘All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech,’ a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit. 

The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as part of NotebookLM, a year-old AI-powered research assistant. NotebookLM, which is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 model, allows people to upload content such as links, videos, PDFs, and text. They can then ask the system questions about the content, and it offers short summaries. 

The tool generates a podcast called Deep Dive, which features a male and a female voice discussing whatever you uploaded. The voices are breathtakingly realistic—the episodes are laced with little human-sounding phrases like ‘Man’ and ‘Wow’ and ‘Oh right’ and ‘Hold on, let me get this right.’ The ‘hosts’ even interrupt each other.”

From MIT Technology Review.

Bloomberg | Communications

Audible to Start Generating AI Voice Replicas of Select Narrators

“Amazon.com Inc.’s Audible will begin inviting a select group of US-based audiobook narrators to train artificial intelligence on their voices, the clones of which can then be used to make audiobook recordings. The effort, which kicks off this week, is designed to add more audiobooks to the service, quickly and cheaply — and to welcome traditional narrators into the evolving world of audiobook automation which, to date, many have regarded warily.”

From Bloomberg.

MIT Technology Review | Science & Technology

Roblox Is Launching a Generative AI That Builds 3D Environments

“Roblox plans to roll out a generative AI tool that will let creators make whole 3D scenes just using text prompts, it announced today. 

Once it’s up and running, developers on the hugely popular online game platform will be able to simply write ‘Generate a race track in the desert,’ for example, and the AI will spin one up. Users will also be able to modify scenes or expand their scope—say, to change a daytime scene to night or switch the desert for a forest. 

Although developers can already create similar scenes like this manually in the platform’s creator studio, Roblox claims its new generative AI model will make the changes happen in a fraction of the time. It also claims that it will give developers with minimal 3D art skills the ability to craft more compelling environments.”

From MIT Technology Review.