Today anyone with an iPad and GarageBand can make the ingredients of modern music: beats. And 300,000 artists in their garages, bedrooms and condos are doing exactly that … with some of them making hundreds of thousands of dollars selling short slices of music on a new Amazon.com for musical mixes, Airbit.
“After using Airbit for a while I started making six figures,” says US music producer Tone Jonez.
Technology has enabled the disaggregation of work, as any of today’s gig economy workers at TaskRabbit, Uber, Fiver, Airbnb or Postmates can tell you. Even knowledge work can be sliced up, divided into tiny segments and sent out to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where tens of thousands of semi-employed people work on pieces of your jobs.
Music — and art in general — seem different. Platforms like Airbit, however, are changing that.