15 years ago, Lars Ulrich of Metallica got up in front of Congress to warn that services like Napster would kill the creatives of America. This is a report on what actually happened in the intervening era, which did see some losses -- but surprisingly, a lot of gains too.

One tangential thing that stood out to me: the author of this essay looked at movies, music, and books from 15 years ago and today. This required him to HAND SORT a lot of them into categories that are hard to capture in data but you know them when you see them... basically stuff having to do with quality and independence of artistic vision. It reminded me that, for all the "big data" in the world, data only has meaning when someone frames it in a way that gives it meaning -- and often the data isn't pre-sorted that way in the first place.

Is it fair to call that the data normalization problem?

Can't analyze the data till we have it in a useful format?

Seems like this article is behind a paywall.

And it's killing my creativity.

I share your frustration about New York Times articles.

New Yorker and HBR and WSJ articles, too. 

But Joyce's comments above are frankly more succinct and thoughtful than the article itself. 

Yes, a very dense article that didn't sufficiently explore the implications of the authors assertion: "What remains is a more direct relationship between the musicians and their fans." This would seem a potent dynamic that will continue to influence the marketplace for artistic creativity and warrants further analysis.  Joyce also touched on a personal frustration of mine--finding real melodies embedded in the noise. Thanks to streaming and wireless speaker systems like Sonos, I can access an unprecedented  data set of music, but I'm not aware of any search engines to  easily make the product of my searches more personally relevant to my tastes or expose me to new artists and musicians. .

Apple Music is a new service that has curated playlists that learn from your tastes as you play more music. So perhaps that's along the lines of a solution like you're looking for?

I agree that many people are frustrated by the process of discovery.