For me, it's obvious that songs have people-enjoy-it-value. It's simultaneously obvious that it has no marginal-cost-to-produce-value. To the extent I believe that music will become more rare if it pays less well, then, I should support some manner of government regulation to protect the industry that produces it. (And, of course, there's the unstated assumption that people will generally not pay when they don't have to, which is also open to debate both on theoretical and empirical terms. And a bunch of other unstated moral assumptions that I'm not going to go into.)
I'm not saying they're overpaid, but it is an interesting economic observation that the supply side of the market might be oversaturated relative to the demand.
Perhaps this is a slight tangent, but are you sure about that? It seems daunting now, but that's probably because you're at the rock bottom of the learning curve. I'll bet there has been more than one brilliant musician who's looked at their sequencing software and thought "I could never write this". I don't mean to suggest that there's a Mozart inside everyone, but I don't see why we couldn't teach musical literacy as "easily" as we teach programming. Music Engineering 101?
Maybe more to the parent's point, it's also possible that it doesn't require a Mozart to make a popular song today. PSY's Gangnam Style is clever and fun but if you turn off the video and don't understand the lyrics, the music is basically sampled from 90s trance hits. You could make a similar argument for Lady Gaga. The major creativity seems to be something layered on top of the music. How notable would OK Go be without the brilliant videos? Yes yes, I love their music too - but there's a lot of great indie rock out there.
Maybe there is a supply/demand curve for music. It's an interesting perspective that I have never heard before. Also consider: Old music doesn't "expire", so as new music is created, it increases the total supply. New bands are not only competing with each other, they're competing with every band that has ever released music.
Creating digital music does have a learning curve...I had a rudimentary knowledge of music. I took a year of piano lessons. I could imitate some of the music I liked. The hardest part was creating something unique. I could be proud of.
Sequencing will always be fun for me. I have amassed some cool toys over the years. It is nothing more than a hobby.
Soundcloud is like a musicians github.
We all know that anecdotes are not data, but the legacy music distribution model seems to be optimized for using labor efficiently a case where fixed and marginal costs are higher than they currently are. It is far from obvious that those optimizations are good ones where the cost of recording equipment has dropped by orders of magnitude and the cost of distributing a single song is so low that people will do it for free.
An album is more feasible to make on one's own, but it's also much more likely to be listened to many more times. I've heard my favorite albums far more than I've watched my favorite movies. But at the same time I realize how much it costs to produce a major motion picture, so I'm okay with paying ten bucks to sit in a theater for two hours. They provide me different kinds of value.
That quality/impact has always been what gave creative works value—the scarcity of physical distribution only enforced that value, it didn't create it. A physical copy of an album nobody liked couldn't be sold for $15, even though it was no more sharable than a physical copy of an album everybody liked. The problem facing creative works with the internet is finding a way to make money off of producing high quality works when you can no longer rely on physical scarcity. But that doesn't mean there is no value there anymore: genius and talent are still scarce.
Moving to models built on services like Pandora and Spotify could turn out to be a good thing if it shifts rewards in favor of things with lasting quality, not just a "make two good hits and ten crappy songs to push a bunch of one-time album sales." But I think they're going to have to bring in a lot more revenue to be really effective at rewarding truly talented artists. But hey, radio is able to do it, and that's a "free" service too.