Common Elements

Once upon a time, I was a college instructor in the “Production Department” of a music school. After the first few years of watching students pass through my classes and recording studio labs, I began to develop my “Theory of Abundance.” After watching what seemed like amazing talents pass through my classrooms, I began to suspect that there are three things of which there are a nearly-infinite supply in the universe: hydrogen, good guitar players, and beautiful young women. (Hopefully, it is equally needless to say that there are more than enough pretty young boys, too?)

Honestly, outside of physics there isn’t much value to take from the understanding that hydrogen is 75% of the mass in the universe. The over-abundance of the other two things should be really informative to a young person starting out in life: you do not want to place all of your bets on being special in a commodity market. Being special requires some rarity. Corn, sow bellies, soybeans, car tires, oil, coal, electricity, electronic components, cell phones, computers, and guitars are, mostly, commodities. That means one example of any of those things will serve the purpose as well as any other example. In a rational world, that would mean that the price of any of those things would be the same and as low as the cost of production allows.

In the case of over-produced farm products, the price is artificially held high to maintain the rural status quo. In the case of musicians and music, the price appears to be heading for the dead bottom because there are no powerful 1%’er special interests who have the money to buy off our state and federal congresscritters who could easily create the same artificially high price structure that they have built for energy, oil and coal, ethanol, cell phone providers, corn and soybeans, meat and dairy, exports, housing, and medical industries from insurance companies to Big Pharma. Don’t look for help from that direction, there just isn’t enough money in the industry to create much interest and the money that was in that business model is going away and most of it is long-gone.