REPENT! The end of music is at hand!

This is from a user review of Logic Studio 8 on Apple's web site:

This is tooooo easy; now all those 5 year olds and "musicians" who became DJs a few years ago have all the skills necessary to become "producers" of music good enough to make your girlfriend dump you. Apple is the new Idol, and here we present the shrink-wrapped souls of thousands, awaiting your command. If you deem yourself an innovator, you'd better think beyond the world of the senses, because this box makes "musical" innovation insignificant. Just as the federal reserve devalues our currency by putting more of it into circulation, apple has now decreased the value of music tenfold. The "musician" as recordist is now dead. Brave souls will resist this monster of manipulation and follow the only humanizing creed left for true musicians: Live Music Only, on instruments not requiring power consumption/electricity/oil/war/pollution. The weak, among whom I count myself, will spend their time alone in front of a computer screen, standing on the shoulders of giants, listening in awe to "what we've created," wasting resources getting our "creations" to the level of "broadcast quality" so we can become a bigger cog in the machine.

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(1430 of 2277 people found this review useful)

The author is obviously half-joking, but this is something I often wonder about -- how do we value music or sound creation? Do your aesthetic sensibilities demand that some degree of work or of "original" transformative technique be evident in the text? I feel especially useless when prompted to respond critically to abstract sound -- do I respond on technical grounds? Aesthetic? Do I address the recording quality of noise? The performance value of found sound? Does responding to recorded sound as a concrete text merely displace our evaluative judgments about performance from the moment of presentation (absentation) to the time of production? That is, are we judging production as a performance?