Modern music is highly commercial. A typical modern person might go a year, hearing music only from professional musicians.
Music is encoded onto plastic, shrink-wrapped, and professionally mass- marketed. Its market value is protected by litigation. Concert tickets are sold by anonymous corporations, and concert tours are managed by professional tour managers. To what extent is this industrialization of music a modern phenomenon? Would typical people and lutenists of the lute age (1500-1700) have been confounded by a world where "music is something which made and sold by strangers"?
