Aspiring artists today often make music alone on a single laptop or even a phone, so whether consciously or not they are wearing many hats; artist, performer, mixer, sound designer, programmer, producer, sound engineer and not forgetting marketing, A&R and possibly label owner!

The danger can be that they end up excelling at none of these roles and creating sub standard work. Most music fans are unaware of the number of highly skilled individuals that are involved in the making of their favourite records, or even that it’s ok to ask for help or assistance from others, that it's not "cheating".

For every sole genius like Prince who played every instrument and composed all his own music, there is a David Bowie who relied heavily on collaboration with the likes of Brian Eno, Nile Rogers, Tony Vis­conti and an army of world class session musicians at his disposal. Tools like Loopcloud and Splice have further democratised the access of artists to professional sounding recordings that can be used as a launchpad for their songs - consider that Lil’ Nas X bought the beat for ‘Old Town Road’ for $50 from the BeatStars website (link: https://www.beatstars.com/) (Wang, 2019) He was exercising his taste in picking this beat which perfectly reflected his ‘country meets trap’ theme.