The End of the Era of Instrumentalists
I grew up in a world where instruments were THE way that music was made. Most houses had a piano of some quality. Kids took lessons. We learned some chords on guitar because that’s what rock music required. Drums were loud and bulky, someone had to be the bass player, if they were a more heady band, they had keyboards too. There was no confusion about the relationship between music and instruments. Instruments weren’t optional. They were the interface.
To go see music meant to go see a band. A group of people, each responsible for different parts of the overall sound, standing together on a stage. You didn’t just hear songs—you watched people in their roles. Music was a collective activity. It was made between people - not inside machines.
The instrumental mastery required to do this well took time - years. Collaboration mattered and no single person was expected to do everything.
There weren’t really viable alternatives to this - some artists might have played multiple instruments on their recordings, but they still had live performances with bands that contained skilled musicians.
A combination of technological advances and budgetary constraints led to adaptations like:
A keyboard replaces a string section, A plugin replaces a horn player, A loop replaces a drummer. Then a laptop replaces a band. We accepted this quietly at first. But the same logic now applies everywhere. The technology that once supplemented musicians increasingly replaces them. None of this was driven because the alternative is of better quality, but because it’s cheaper, faster, and scalable.
More than ever, music is made and recorded alone. Most music today is made in bedrooms, not basements. Bands are shrinking. Rehearsal rooms are disappearing. This isn’t just a cultural preference—it’s an economic necessity. Touring is expensive. Collaboration is slow.
There is another shift that comes with this change: Geography and location no longer hold the meaning that they used to. We now live in a global village sonically. Place once shaped sound—New Orleans, Detroit, Nashville, London. Now sound floats free of geography.
In the past, great bands could once survive by grinding locally. Now that pathway is gone.
The Beatles played clubs in Hamburg for months because that infrastructure existed. It no longer does. The concept of “being there” or “making the scene” is dissolving.
Music has been moving toward non-physical existence for decades:
CDs → MP3s → streams
studios → laptops
and
scenes → algorithms
What happens to live music and musicians as this progresses?
Jinichi Kawakami, often called “The Last Ninja,” once said:
“Now we have guns, the internet, and much better medicines, so the art of ninjutsu has no place in the modern age.”
He wasn’t lamenting incompetence or cultural decline. He was naming a reality: when the infrastructure that gives meaning to a craft disappears, the craft itself becomes functionally obsolete.
I can’t help thinking of Kawakami's words and thinking of his position when looking at the modern music landscape—especially for those of us whose aspirations were molded in the era of bands, session musicians, and instrumental heroes. This was an era where roles mattered. Guitarists, drummers, bassists, keyboard players—each had a job and was part of a lineage.
For these musicians, craft was respected. Specialization was celebrated.
Today, instrumental virtuosity is increasingly treated like a novelty—a “freak skill” rather than a cultural cornerstone.
The intent of recording music as a whole has changed. Recordings used to document something that existed outside the studio: a band, a sound, a collective feel. The goal was capture. Now the goal of recorded music is often construction of something totally separate.
Modern recordings are often layered, edited, tuned, quantized, and often assembled by a single person. Individual instrumental parts no longer need to sound human—or even real. They only need to function. It’s a shift in intent, and when the purpose of a recording changes, the value of the skills required to make it changes too.
A result of this is the radical shift in the volume of musical recordings. A study by music data analysis company Luminate found that 120,000 new tracks are uploaded to streaming services every day. When music exists in that quantity, it stops functioning like an artifact and starts functioning like a stream—endless, replaceable, and disposable.
This change in process and in volume has profound implications. Some possible implications that could be extrapolated from this could be:
No single recording is precious.
Longevity is impossible to predict.
The idea of “the canon” collapses.
In general, music isn’t scarce anymore - attention is.
Of course, in essence, this isn’t new. Music has always followed money and technology.
Economics and innovation have always driven music from the phonograph to the first electric guitar.
Love for music and musical talent are as prevalent as ever. What’s changed is the system that needed and rewarded collective instrumental mastery.
Today’s musical heroes are producers, curators, DJs, and technologists.
Classical and conservatory traditions will continue to survive, but largely separate from the mainstream.
SO WHAT NOW?
My view is optimistic. Although I lament the era of the instrumentalist, the new generative tools and synthetic performance aren’t necessarily bad- they are some of the new tools. The question isn’t whether instrumentalists can survive the technologically-driven changes. That battle is already over.
To me, the real question is how do we preserve depth, craft, and meaning inside a system that seems to be indifferent to them?
The era of instrumentalists may be ending—but the era of limitless possibility is fully here. How it all shakes out is still undecided.