"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."

It's not going to be generative music, though - sorry Brian!

See, one of the things people like about music (or art or anything) is the definitiveness - this is the way it is, this is the way it will be each time I look at it, hear it, watch it, read it....  

This is the way it is, and more than that (as with a novel's plot), this is the way it should be - this is the only way it could ever have been  - 

People like the idea, or sensation, that something has arrived at its ordained form, the best version of itself

Exactly this organized arrangement of colours and lines, or notes and timbres and beats, or storyline and characters. 

That's why there's only ever been a limited ultra-nerd consumer base for alternative takes and demos and prototype versions of e.g. "Strawberry Fields".... or for Director's Cut expansions (like the fairly poor and utterly extraneous additional material in the extended Apocalypse Now) and deleted scenes and so forth...  It's why only scholars of literature like to inspect the first drafts of novels and plays... 

What about remixes? 

Ah but you see - a great remix, a successful remix, achieves its own definitive form....  you want to hear that over and over again, exactly those same perfect decisions made by the remixer....

A remix that remixed itself each time you played it and was majorly or even slightly different - that would be exasperating!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ah but you say - 

What about jazz improvisation in the live situ? 

What about singers interpreting the great American Song Book? 

What about conductors and orchestras with their different versions of the classical repertoire? 

What about restagings of plays (modern dress versions etc?)

What about what deejays do in the mix, taking two records and making a third one out of them? 

Hmmm.... well I like listening to jazz records, born of improvisation, as if they were composed - it's just a different route to definitiveness as far as I'm concerned. I get as bored with the mega-expanded On the Corner / In A Silent Way etc boxes as I do the expanded Beatles / etc 

The fact that you have to do research to find out which is the best version of the Pastoral Symphony or Carnival of Animals or "Trois Gymnopedies"  is annoying to me - that there is a range of opinion on the subject and a bewildering number of options.... I always think, "why can't it be like pop, where's there's only one "Strawberry Fields" that counts...."  

Different readings of "My Funny Valentine" or whatever is slightly more interesting / appealing to me for some reason...  it's like different actors playing the same classic part...   but I wouldn't want to listen to a whole range of different recordings of Sinatra doing "You Make Feel So Young". I'd want the definitive Sinatra version as captured on Songs for Swingin' Lovers...   A live version would only make me contemplate the ways it departs from that definitive and unimprovable rendering in the studio.

Plays - well yes I suppose so ... but at the end of the day, the script, the dialogue, the characters, the plot, can only be faithfully rendered. The stuff that is at the discretion of the director, costumer, stage designer and the actors themselves is not the essential element....  although it's true that when misjudged and ill-conceived, or badly executed by the players, it can mar that essence, badly vandalize it. 

I think deejays and deejaying are overrated. There is a ratio between the magic that a deejay can do and the indistinctness of the records being mixed. The more unique and stand-alone brilliant a track is, the harder it is for deejays to do their work. That's why the really creative deejays like LTJ Bukem or Jeff Mills work with characterless materials, stuff that blends easily or that can be concatenated (DJ tools - unfinished tracks, effectively).  (Bukem created a whole label and a stable of producers to generate Bukem-a-like mid-tier tunes for him mix seamlessly).  The inverted ratio is that the creativity of the deejay must be correspondingly absent from the tunes they are working with.