I think that we often conflate ‘music’ with ‘recorded music’. Recorded music has only existed for the past ~100 years and really only the dominant form of music distribution in the past ~50 years, but music-making has been around for many centuries longer.
To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature of the event that is a musical performance.
Thinking of ‘music’ as ‘recordings’ has the pitfall that recordings can’t escape being a commodity.
…most of the music people hear is industrially produced as a commodity, mass distributed as a commodity, and widely consumed as a commodity.
Commodification always alters the message.
“The commodity character of music tends radically to alter it.” Music, [Adorno] thought, “has ceased to be a human force and is consumed like other consumer goods,” which “produces ‘commodity listening,’ a listening whose ideal is to dispense as far as possible without any effort on the part of the recipient–even if such an effort on the part of the recipient is the necessary condition of grasping the sense of the music. (Adorno 2009b, 137)”
The sound object itself has become artifice, independent of the listener and composer, represented, then repeated.
Musicians obviously benefit from the commodification of music so they can make a living in a capitalist society.
That Edison didn’t conceive of his device as one that could play professionally recorded music wasn’t surprising, for he lived in an era when music was still something one made for oneself or heard live. The idea that one would pay for previously recorded music was foreign to most people, and indeed Edison resisted entering the business of selling prerecorded music, though he ultimately acquiesced, as he and others slowly became accustomed to the idea that musical sound was something that could be purchased.
Persuading the public, long accustomed to making their own music and hearing music live, to purchase a player piano or a phonograph (or, later, a radio) took several decades of promotion by the recording and broadcasting industries. Consumers at first had to be assured that they weren’t surrendering agency, that they were bringing their interpretive powers to the “performance” of player piano rolls.